Beside Firefox extensions, I have found another way to up my productivity online, and it’s all through the magic that is the Search bar. On the top right of the Firefox window, you’ll find a search bar which I believe defaults to Google search. However, you can find search engines and add them to access your results faster. If you try to manage these plugins from inside Firefox itself, you’ll only get a handful of them, and the official Firefox Add-Ons page gives you some 10 or 20 more. But that sure doesn’t cover every site that you might want to search, right? Enter Mycroft Project.
I don’t recall how I stumbled on Mycroft Project in the first place, but I do know that ever since I’ve found it, it’s been a huge time saver. What does Mycroft Project essentially offer? It’s a part of Mozilla’s developer network and it just lists search plugins for Firefox, for almost every site or service you could ever want to search. You simply click on the plugin and it’s added to your search bar uptop. I hear you asking for examples, so let’s go:
Google Images: As a blogger, I am always looking for images for my posts, and as a researcher I find myself often times looking for a specific figure showing some relevant data for my project. Google Images is part of my daily routine and having quick access to it is a huge deal.
Flickr Tags: same reason as Google Images, except that it gives me more “human” results.
Pubmed and other NCBI resources: Pubmed is the holy grail for medical researchers with millions of articles, and accessing it with a simple click, no questions asked, makes me love using it even more.
Localised Wikipedia : sure, Wikipedia in english is cool and all, but what if you want to search Wikipedia in other languages, like your own country’s language? This is a list of all Wikipedia related search plugins, and it lists the localized Wikipedia sites as well.
Wolfram Alpha: the new computational knowledge search engine (or whatever other complicated name they have for it) is starting to make its effect, but it’s always easier to access it directly without having to open its main page.
Dictionary and Thesaurus : English being only my 3rd language, I find myself often times looking for the definition of a word, a synonym to replace it with, or simply to see if I’m spelling something correctly. I usually use the Merriam-Webster tools on those lists.
LetsSingIt song search: I usually have all 4 of these plugins installed, but the one I use the most is “lyrics words”. This plugin allows me to search all of LetSingIt’s database for a particular set of lyrics. I don’t have to know the song’s name, nor the artist, nor the album, just 4 or 5 words from any part of the song and LetsSingIt usually pumps up the whole song info page with full lyrics. Wicked.
IMDB: The Internet Movie Database is my go-to site when I want to check any movie/actor information. Mycroft has a plugin for the full site as well as for the TV section.
Mycroft Project itself: this one is definitely the best of the best! Whenever I find myself using the search function of a site quite often, I run to Mycroft to see if there’s a search plugin for Firefox, until one day I noticed that I was using the search function of Mycroft itself quite often. That’s how I decided to get Mycroft’s own search plugin.
These are a few examples of search plugins I have inside Firefox that make it easier for me to access my results without having to browse to each individual website, wait for the page to load, find the search bar, click inside it, start typing, then get my results. Of course, Mycroft has a full library of other plugins and I’m pretty sure you’ll find everything you want in there.
As a bonus, here is the Dotsisx tip for even faster search: use the keyboard shortcuts. In Firefox, clicking Ctl+K will get your cursor to the search box, start typing right away if the search engine you want is selected or else scroll to your seach engine with ctl+up or ctl+down then start typing. I’ve been using these plugins for over a year now, and I can’t stress enough on how much time and bandwidth they have saved me. Go try them, and if you find a search engine worth adding, be sure to drop a comment here.
Tags: Firefox, Mycroft, Search plugins
For someone who has english as a third language, your grammar, spelling and prose is flawless. 2 thumbs up!