Google keyboard shortcuts in your browsers search bar

If you are the type of person who thinks having to take you hands off the keyboard and use the mouse is an unnecessary waist of time…

go to- http://www.google.com/experimental/

sign-up to the keyboard short cut experiment. And have a play.

Now wouldn’t it be great if Google did this every time you searched, using the search bar in firefox? I thought so…

Drop google.xml in to the searchplugins directory in your firefox directory (probably- C:Program FilesMozilla Firefoxsearchplugins or corresponding directory on a mac) replacing the existing one (you may want to backup the original (do this in a different directory)).

Restart firefox.

Bingo!

I think that this should also work for other browsers that support the same search plug-in standard too.

How it works… Open the google.xml file with a text editor and have a look. All I’ve done is added &esrch=BetaShortcuts into the URL.