Firefox’s search box is one of the most important features of the browser. It lets you search for information on the web, and it’s a great way to find what you’re looking for. But there are some things you can do to make Firefox’s search box use Google’s experimental search keys. First, open Firefox and click on the three lines in the top left corner of the screen. This will open a menu that will let you choose which type of search you want to perform: text-based searches, images searches, or both. If you only want to use text-based searches, select “Text Search.” If you want to use images searches as well, select “Images Search.” Now click on one of the three buttons in the menu that corresponds to what type of search you just performed. For example, if you just used text-based searches, clicking on “Images Search” would result in a list of images that can be searched for. If you only used images searches, clicking on “Text Search” would result in a list of results for text-based Searches only. If everything worked as it should and your search results were correct, Firefox would display an error message telling you that there was something wrong with your input (perhaps because your computer doesn’t support image searching). However, if everything didn’t work as expected and your results were not correct either - perhaps because Firefox was unable to find any images related to what you were looking for - then Firefox would display an error message telling you that there was something wrong with your computer (perhaps becauseimage searching).
Check out the keyboard shortcut goodness… use J and K for next/previous results, O to open and / to move back to the search box (extremely cool for when you don’t find anything with the first search)
I’m sure that Google or somebody else will eventually release a search plugin that enables this by default.
Update:Thanks to Gina @ Lifehacker, you can get the plugin goodness without having to manually modify anything. My technique still works, but it’s probably easier to use Gina’s plugin.
If you still want to do it manually, navigate to your Firefox installation directory, and open the searchplugins folder.
Essentially all we’re going to do is add the bolded line to the google.xml file, which you can download here, or edit it yourself.
—- snipped for length —-
Make sure you backup the existing file before you replace it with this one, restarting Firefox when you are done.
You can see that the search suggestions still work, but now you will be sent to the experimental search instead of the regular one.
Thanks to Lifehacker for pointing me to this one.
