Searching the Big Boys Right in Camino

First
off, let’s take a look at a little used feature of Camino book marks–keywords. When
viewing your bookmarks (in the window not the menu bar), you can hit
command-i or right click
and
hit get info. This will
bring up a window that you can see an example of at right.

You can make
a keyword (as I did in the screen capture) here. The next time you
want to visit
that
site,
which in this case is my newest site: News
Is Crappy,
you can just type the keyword into the link bar.

I haven’t quite figured out what the description does for you (besides
help you out if you are forgetful). If you know, shoot me an email and
I’ll fill everyone else in.

Once you have using keywords down, it’s only a simple hop to getting
in built in searching. Let’s examine the default URL structure of
Google:

http://www.google.com/search?q=Jon%20Gales

That breaks down into a few parts:

1. http://www.google.com
2. search?q=
3. Jon%20Gales

What we’re interested
in is #3 since it’s the only part that changes. Try changing Jon%20Gales to Mac%20news–Google
searches for “Mac
news”. You probably already
knew that. Lazy nerds like me have been typing in search queries in that
format for years (seriously not kidding here folks–it’s almost a disorder).

Camino has a little known feature that does substitution… Try bookmarking
this:

http://www.google.com/search?q=%s

Now make it have a keyword of something easy (I use g because it’s quick
but still has meaning to Google). Try typing in your keyword, followed by
a space, followed by a search term. If you used g as your keyword, and my
name as your search query, it will look like this:

g Jon Gales

If you set up everything correctly, the page you’ll be taken to this
page–or the search listings for my name.You didn’t have to visit the
home page of
Google. You didn’t have to go click on the tool bar. You can search Google
with a quick, “command-l, g search term, return”. It’s sick.
The moral of the story? %s substitutes whatever is after the keyword
into the URL.

The fun doesn’t stop there, since URL hacking isn’t too hard (just break
it down like I did and look for the search terms), you can make these bookmarks
for almost any site that has search. Remember that %20 simply means a space.
The only ones you can’t use with this method are sites that
use POST ,
which
is really
rare for search (POST is used when there is a lot of data being input,
or it’s of a sensitive nature).You’ll know it’s post if there is no ?
in the URL and your search terms aren’t in it anywhere.

One last quick tip, you can do this same method on a group of sites that
you bookmark together (when bookmarking when you have tabs open check the
bookmark all box). For instance, if you want to search Reuters, Google
News, and Yahoo! News all at the same time it is possible.

Below is a list
of keywords that I set up for a some sites. I’d love to hear what
you have set up.

List of sites that I often use keyword substition for:

Amazon.com -> amzn
eBay.com -> ebay
Google News -> gnews
MacUpdate -> mu