Ubiquitous search

So I’m a big fan of Ubiq­uity. Eas­ily one of my favorite Fire­fox exten­sions. If you’ve not heard of it, it’s basi­cally a set of com­mands exposed in Fire­fox, akin to Quick­sil­ver/GNOME Do/Launchy but, you know, for web stuff.

One of my favorite com­mands that I’ve found is sim­ply called Search, cour­tesy of Blair McBride. It enables any exist­ing search engines (OpenSearch) to be used within Ubiq­uity, so rather than issu­ing “ama­zon really neat stuff” or “google that thing I wanted to look up” I can sim­ply issue “search pol­i­tics with Google News”. The sky’s the limit.

Cou­ple that with Add to Search Bar exten­sion and you have some real power. Add to Search Bar allows you to right-click on a search field (on any web­site) and add it as a search engine in Fire­fox. Cer­tainly the heavy hit­ters will be auto-detected as search engines, but this allows you to search what you want (e.g. Google Images, Boxoh uni­ver­sal pack­age track­ing, Snopes). Because a) I’ve col­lapsed my Search Engines bar and b) don’t use it directly any­more, I’ve added a lot more search engines:

My list of search engines

I’ve sug­gested to the Ubiq­uity team that OpenSearch engines be auto­mat­i­cally added (and the com­mand syn­tax a bit less awk­ward), but the Search com­mand is cer­tainly a step in the right direction.