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Notices tagged with searchtip
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How to add Google News, Google Books, and Google Scholar search directly in your browser, to search those sites with fewer steps, and less chance of being distracted.
One of my hobbies is contributing to Wikipedia, and more so, creating new Wikipedia articles. Citations of reliable sources are key to both good contributions, and new articles, especially in making them stick (not get reverted/deleted).
I use Google News to search for citations, and depending on the topic, sometimes Google Books and Google Scholar.
Unfortunately, to search Google News, you have to first go to Google News (news.google .com - deliberately unlinked here), upon which you are immediately shown distracting (if not dire) news photos, headlines etc. which present a non-trivial challenge to staying focused.
If only there was a way to directly search Google News from your browser search box / address bar (like you can search Wikipedia from your browser).
Unfortunately, there is no site-specific search option for Google News (like there is for YouTube, e.g. see https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/add-or-remove-search-engine-firefox#w_add-search-engines) that you can select an add to your browser in one click (enabled by OpenSearch support, link in footer).
This is another technology I use for category 2 (defending focus) that I mentioned in my previous post on focus.
Steps to add a Google News search option to Firefox:
1. open Firefox Preferences ("Firefox" menu, "Preferences" item)
2. select "🔍 Search" from the left column
3. scroll down to "Search Shortcuts"
4. click the "Add" button under the list of search engines which opens a dialog
5. enter "Google News" into the Search engine name field (without quotes)
6. enter "https://news.google.com/search?q=%s" into the URL field (without quotes)
7. enter "gn" into the Keyword field (without quotes)
The dialog should look like this:
8. click (Add Engine)
Now you can go to your address bar, type in "gn " (without the quotes), your news search term or phrase, e.g. "Broken Arrow Skyrace", and press return to directly see search results.
Similarly for Google Books, follow the same steps except:
5. enter "Google Books" into the Search engine name field (without quotes)
6. enter "https://books.google.com/books?q=%s" into the URL field (without quotes)
7. enter "gb" into the Keyword field (without quotes)
And similarly for Google Scholar:
5. enter "Google Scholar" into the Search engine name field (without quotes)
6. enter "https://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=%s" into the URL field (without quotes)
7. enter "gs" into the Keyword field (without quotes)
Thanks to folks in the #indieweb informal chat who reminded me (when I complained about the distracting Google News home page) of this way to add new site-specific search capabilities to the browser even for sites (or subsites) without explicit OpenSearch support.
Looking forward to using these capabilities to more quickly find citations for updating and creating new Wikipedia articles.
Previously:
* https://tantek.com/2026/158/t2/three-insights-improving-focus
* https://tantek.com/2024/287/t2/setup-search-shortcuts-firefox
OpenSearch FYI:
* https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/XML/Guides/OpenSearch
#focus #Wikipedia #Firefox #GoogleNews #GoogleBooks #GoogleScholar #search #siteSearch #AddSearchEngine #searchEngine #searchEngines #OpenSearch #webSearch #SearchShortcuts #browserTip #FirefoxTip #searchTip
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Bing use-case! AKA One Weird Trick Time And Date Sites Hate
In my prior postÂą I noted that I use 'b' as a Search Shortcut for #Bing. Here is why:
* quickly view a Gregorian calendar month display, with readable days, days of the week, and weekends & holidays highlighted.
E.g. I type this into my Firefox address bar:
b dec 2024
then press return and immediately see:
Only Microsoft Bing search supports this.
On other search engines (Duckduckgo, Google, Yahoo) all you get are links to random date time sites littered with ads, or blurry images of calendar months where the day numbers and holidays are too small to read.
This is something I have informally complained about to friends for years, that if you use Google Search for unit conversions, simple arithmetic, and even names of holidays, you get a nice large font “featured snippet” display of exactly your answer. But not something as simple as a month and year or even month with the implication that you want to see the current or next instance of that month.
How hard can that be to build? 12 names of months. 12 more 3-letter abbreviations. Multiplied by however number of languages supported. An intern could code that in under an hour. Someone has likely already written a regular expression for detecting this. (Aside: I tried year first, e.g. 2024 Dec, and hilariously enough that did not work to show the nice month display. So I suspect there is a minimal regular expression under the covers of this Bing feature.)
From having tried search engines for years, I was pretty convinced no one supported this.
Then on a whim I tried this in Bing recently (maybe I hadn’t before?) and to my pleasant surprise it worked.
There you have it, a use-case for Bing that only works in Bing, and reason enough to add a 'b' Search Shortcut in Firefox for Bing.
#search #webSearch #SearchShortcut #Microsoft #BingTip #searchTip #calendar #month
Âą https://tantek.com/2024/287/t2/setup-search-shortcuts-firefox
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You should setup Search Shortcuts in #Firefox, they have sped up my web browsing experience considerably.
James (@jamesg.blog) wrote up a great summary of how to do so and his experience:
* https://jamesg.blog/2024/10/13/search-engine-shortcuts-firefox/
I use DuckDuckGo as my default search engine, so here are the Search Shortcuts I have setup when I want to explicitly search/lookup something elsewhere, roughly ordered by my perceived frequency of use:
i - IndieWeb - https://indieweb.org/
w - Wikipedia - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/
g - Google - https://google.com/
d - MDN Web Docs - https://developer.mozilla.org/
m - Google Maps - https://maps.google.com/
b - Bing - https://bing.com/
a - Amazon - https://amazon.com/
x - Twitter - https://twitter.com/search
If you don’t see one of these search engines in your Firefox Settings: Search Shortcuts, you can visit its URL above and then follow the instructions in James’s blog post to add it to your browser’s list of search engines. Once added there, it will show up in the Search Shortcuts table and you can double-click it and add a one-letter (or more) shortcut as you wish!
What Search Shortcuts have you setup in your browser?
#search #OpenSearch #webSearch #SearchShortcuts #browserTip #FirefoxTip #searchTip
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