Friday, November 12, 2004

I keep finding new features i like in Firefox. The latest is keyword search in the "location bar" (where you normally type a URL). Type "weather" there and you get weather.com. Type "stock vz" and you get a quote for Verizon stock (please buy some and help get my options above water!).

The behavior is a little hard to predict, though. Entering "time" comes up empty-handed ("The operation timed out when attempting to contact time": pun unintended i'm sure), but "time now" brings up this page with (you guessed it) the current time. It seems to be hit or miss: "bible" brings up Bible Gateway, "new testament" brings up Goodacre's blog, "concordance" brings up this page with interfaces for searching Strong's. "semanticbible" (no spaces) brings up my site, with a space "semantic bible" it brings up Glenn's reference to my site,  but "semantic" itself brings up nothing. I'd love to have a real description of what's happening behind the scenes.

The cool thing is you can define your own. Here's how i set up a passage search against the ESV:

  • Ctrl-B to view the bookmarks in the sidebar
  • right-click on Quick Searches to create a New Bookmark
  • Name = "ESV Passage Search"
  • Location = http://www.gnpcb.org/esv/search/?passage=%s
  • Keyword = "esv"
  • Building on their existing examples, i put 'Type "esv <ref>" to ook up passages in the English Standard Version Bible' for the description

Now you can go to the location bar, type "esv Col 3:16", and get the verse. The capability is fully general: whatever terms you supply get substituted for the %s in the location URL. Items in your search bar also have this capability (e.g. you can do "amazon <bookname>" and search that way).

Alas, entering "blogos" as a quick search doesn't bring up my blog as it should, but instead that upstart blog on language and technology that appropriated my name a full year after i'd been using it (me, bitter? never! ).


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