Friday Hack: Search Keys extension for Firefox and Yahoo! Search
- Posted November 8th, 2004 at 10:45 am by Yahoo! Search
- Categories: Search Tips
Search Keys is a great little Firefox extension that makes navigating search results easier from the keyboard. I couldn’t stand to see this cool functionality not yet available for Yahoo! Search, so I built a quick Friday Hack (more on that tradition later) last week…
Here’s what you need to do to try it:
- First, download the Search Keys extension for Firefox.
- Shutdown Firefox.
- Search your profiles extensions folder for
search-keys.jar and replace it with this one. - Restart Firefox and do a Yahoo! Search.
You should now get little numbers
in boxes next to your Yahoo! Search results. Press the number to jump to
that result.
Once I know this is working well and we’ve gotten all the bugs out, I’ll
send a patch to the Search Keys maintainer. So let me know what you think.
Marc Abramowitz
Technical Yahoo
- 9 Comments
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where is the profiles extensions folder?
Fantastic! I’m really excited to see Yahoo! specific extensions starting to show up for Firefox. Now, how about an extension for MySearch?
On my machine (Windows 2000 with Firefox 1.0 PR), the file is at C:\Documents and Settings\Marc\Application Data\Mozilla\Firefox\Profiles\8louy9l2.default\extensions\{003dc6ae-2505-4639-be60-9132ac0d8814}\chrome
Adjust accordingly for your setup.
Note that the “Application Data” file is typically hidden in Windows by default.
MySearch – interesting – what did you have in mind?
By the way, I neglected to mention that this hack also works for many Yahoo Searches, including Image Search, Local, Products, News, and even Yahoo Personals.
Hopefully, we can put up a proper .xpi file after Firefox 1.0 is final and we’re confident that they’re not going to change their extension manager again.
MySearch Ideas
1 – set up MySearch as a option that can be added to the Nav bar search box (get it added to the list of search engines found here – http://mycroft.mozdev.org/quick/yahoo.html)
2 – set up an extension that adds the bookmarklet function to the right-click context menu.
The more I look at it, the more I think that a full fledged Y!Search Extension might be worth exploring. Perhaps something like the Context Search extension, but offering the full range of Y!Search options when you highlite a word in a page.
I’m using Firefox 1.0/Powerbook G4. I’m trying to use the “Alt” key to get the result to open in a new tab rather then going through the current tab. It does not seem to be working. I’m trying it while also holding down the “FN” key and “Shift” key b/c the Powerbook keyboard does not have a stand-alone “Alt” key. No luck.
Any thoughts?
Thanks
Stuart
This extension is awesome! It works great with my Firefox browser. I am using the latest release version of Firefox:
Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.7.5) Gecko/20041107 Firefox/1.0
(Copy/paste from Help->About)
The Search Keys maintainer has released version 0.6, which has my additions, so you don’t have to mess around with jar files now. Get it at http://www.squarefree.com/extensions/search-keys/
Hey
I agree with what you’re saying. Thanks for sharing the info with us.
have yahoo mail but yahoo is not on my desktop