Academic Lozbo

A few months ago, I was browsing through the Google Experimental Search, and noticed one that particularly drew my attention, a search with shortcuts (or hot keys).

Background

I am an avid fanatic of keyboard shortcuts, it might not look like, but in the end of the day you notice they really can make a difference.

Anyway, in this Google experiment, you type your query like you would normally, but the difference is in the search results page: there you can navigate through the links with the normal Google Apps shortcuts: J and K. So all you have to do is perform a search and browse through results forward (J) or backwards (K). Hit enter to go to the selected site.

Not a big deal but it can be helpful to some.

Download and install

So I took the time to put together a Firefox search engine to add to my favorite browser, so each time you want to trigger a Google shortcuts search you would do it as you do it now (in Firefox): control+k.

All you have to do is download the xml (secondary click, save as…) and install it in your Firefox search engine directory. Depending on your operative system is the location of this folder, normally you would install them in your own user profile, under the respective Firefox directory.

Install in Mac OS X

Images talk a thousand letters, wait no, they are worth a million dollars, or something like that:

It was not that easy to find the directory but there you go. It should be inside your own Mac User profile, it’s a little bit hard to find but the path should be something like:

HD:Users:[username]:Library:Application Support:Firefox:Profiles: [someWeirdUserNameProfile.default] :searchplugins

Install in Windows XP or Vista (haven’t tried in previous versions)

As I said, normally you would have to install it in your own user directory, but when I can, I rather copy it to the Firefox installation folder, which in most Windows default installs might look like the following:

C:\Program Files\Mozilla Firefox\searchplugins

You must copy your file there.

Install in Linux

I don’t know! I don’t currently run any Linux OS . But if you are a Linux user I bet you already know where it belongs , tell me about it and I’ll be happy to update this post.