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November 08, 2004

Friday Hack: Search Keys extension for Firefox and Yahoo! Search

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:

  1. First, download the Search Keys extension for Firefox.
  2. Shutdown Firefox.
  3. Search your profiles extensions folder for search-keys.jar and replace it with this one.
  4. 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

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Comments

where is the profiles extensions folder?

Posted by: Anonymous | November 8, 2004 02:18 PM

Fantastic! I'm really excited to see Yahoo! specific extensions starting to show up for Firefox. Now, how about an extension for MySearch?

Posted by: Jerry Welch | November 8, 2004 02:49 PM

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.

Posted by: Marc Abramowitz | November 8, 2004 11:01 PM

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.

Posted by: Jerry Welch | November 9, 2004 02:35 PM

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

Posted by: Stuart Watson | November 12, 2004 08:37 AM

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)

Posted by: Satish | November 15, 2004 10:26 AM

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/

Posted by: Marc Abramowitz | November 15, 2004 11:07 AM

Hey

I agree with what you're saying. Thanks for sharing the info with us.

Posted by: webcam | March 2, 2005 10:21 PM

have yahoo mail but yahoo is not on my desktop

Posted by: dean | August 30, 2005 10:14 AM