Customize your Firefox Search Box (with your own Blog!)
Douglas KarrThanks for stopping by my personal blog on Marketing Technology! Over 50,000 visitors a month find my content worth returning for, so don't forget to subscribe to the Marketing Technology Blog RSS feed or to the Marketing Technology Email to have new content sent directly to your inbox. You may also find my other business blog helpful, Social Media Domination.
You may have figured out my now that I’m a Firefoxaholic. I love the browser… it’s lightweight and very simple to use. One of the other features I like is the search list up in the top right. I can have all my favorite search engines in there and flip back and forth.
To add a search engine for Firefox, you just have to go to the Search Engine Add On page and click the ones that you want to install them.
But did you know that you could build one for your own site? It’s actually quite simple. The format for Search Engine plugins is a combination of an XML file (.src) and an image to display. Tonight, I got an idea… how could I add my site to that list of Search Engines?
It’s actually quite easy. My search address for my site (you can test this with my search box) is http://marketingtechblog.com?s=something where “s” is the variable and something is the term that is searched for.
Applying these to a simple form, I wrote some code to dynamically generate the src file that is used to add a search engine to your browser. Click here to go to the form and add your own blog or site (if it has search capabilities), to your own blog!
If you love someone else’s blog, like John Chow… you can add your own John Chow Search engine with s as the variable! URL: http://www.johnchow.com/?s=something. Like Problogger? You can add that one the same way!
Matt Cutts? URL: http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/ and s for the variable.
Unless customized, s is always the variable for WordPress blogs so this can really be helpful. Hope you like it!
I am trying to add my Google CSE via this method but I am having issues… what am I missing?
This is great stuff.. thanks so much Douglas!
I was actually going to try that next. Firefox is a little finicky on the path statement for the source file. I had to trick it in order to get this to work. Let me take a look at that in a day or so and I’ll see what we can come up with. I’m guessing it’s some kind of issue with the characters passed.
Doug
I must confess that it was self-serving. I’m constantly searching my own site for things I’ve forgotten.