Sunday, January 21, 2007

Search any site from anywhere

A nice feature of Google Toolbar ver.3 for Firefox is that it allows you to focus your toolbar search window to specific websites. For example, I often have occasion to search just usinfo.state.gov, or ircworld.blogspot.com, or our own embassy website. Rather than going to each of those sites and entering my search in their respective search windows, I just enter the search word in the search window in my Google toolbar, then select the appropriate icon from my toolbar (I've got one for each of those sites) - or from the Google searchbar dropdown menu - to focus my search to one site. The built-in search window that comes with Firefox has had a comparable feature for quite some time, but there one is dependent on help from resourceful programmers to develop and share the plugin you need for the specific search (many are available - even local ones such as the Norwegian white pages - but they of course comprise only a tiny fraction of all the local searches that exist on the web). With the Google toolbar you can create the local search yourself simply by right-clicking in the search window of the site you want to search, and hey presto, you've created an icon and menu item that allows you to search that site from your browser toolbar, no matter where on the web you might be! Nifty!