You probably use a search engine to navigate the Internet. However, you might not know that Firefox's1 “add keyword” feature allows you to directly search any website with an input field.
As for why you'd want to do this:
Let's take Wiktionary as an example, a multilingual dictionary.
Navigate to Wiktionary and right click Wiktionary's input field. A menu should pop up.
Click the “Add a Keyword for this Search…” option. Firefox should now
present you with a dialog box asking for the name of the bookmark, the
folder to save the bookmark in, and a keyword (I chose wkt
).
If you were following along, you can now type in wkt
(or whatever you
chose as a keyword) into Firefox's search bar followed by a word and
find its definition. If you don't have any ideas, figure out what the
difference between somnambulism and funambulism is, and why the two
probably wouldn't go well together.
You can search the ArchWiki, Wikipedia, or whatever you want in this
fashion. In addition, keywords work with ordinary bookmarks too (for
instance, awl
is mapped to the “List of applications” ArchWiki
entry on my
computer). The main difference with regular bookmarks is that you don't
type anything except the keyword since you're no longer performing a query.
I prefer the bookmark method over adding a site as a search engine for two reasons:
Anything based on Firefox, such as Tor Browser, can also make use of this feature (assuming the fork is sufficiently up to date). ↩