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If you have Firefox I would suggest that you go on Wikipedia.org, right-click the search box, click "Add keyword to this search", and pick a keyword. This makes

If you have Firefox I would suggest that you go on Wikipedia.org, right-click the search box, click "Add keyword to this search", and pick a keyword. This makes it faster to find information that you know is on Wikipedia.

clairity 6y ago
yah, keywords are such a great but probably underutilized feature of firefox. i set up 'wiki' and a bunch of others when i started using firefox over a decade ago. i still use most today, although i've pointedly replaced google with duckduckgo ('g') long ago as well.
boogies 6y ago
This, but also, when you're stuck on Chromium, change the default search to DuckDuckGo or Searx and use !w or !wp to search Wikipedia (and !s !sp if you want Google results for some reason, and !g or !go if you want Google results with a filter bubble).
- boogies 6y ago
  Addendum: sorry to imply you can't also use keywords there, thanks to oefhra for reminding me you can https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23478553 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23478553
ma2rten 6y ago
In chrome you can type en.wikipedia.org and hit tab. For me it will autocomplete if you just type en.
- delecti 6y ago
  The default is the whole domain (and it also works with other sites, like "amazon.com query"), but you can also change the keyword for it. For several years I've had "wp" as the keyword for wikipedia searches, and it works in both Firefox and Chrome. I just type "wp whatever my query is", no tab needed, and it will take me directly to the result.
oefrha 6y ago
Chrome has had custom search engine keywords since day one (yes, I actually went to locate a day-one article on this feature[1]). Not sure why every time this topic comes up someone has to mention it as if it’s some sort of Firefox secret sauce, complete with weird replies like if you are “stuck on Chromium” you can emulate this with a pointless round trip to DuckDuckGo. [1] https://searchengineland.com/searching-with-google-chrome-omnibox-14664 https://searchengineland.com/searching-with-google-chrome-om...
- airstrike 6y ago
  Agreed. I've had "en" as my keyword for Wikipedia searches on Chrome since 2008...
- doublesCs 6y ago
  > Not sure why every time this topic comes up someone has to mention it as if it’s some sort of Firefox secret sauce If you're not sure I can clarify that for you. I was responding to someone talknig about ddg, and I was showing a better way of doing it. I didn't know that it's possible with Chrome because I don't use it.
  - oefrha 6y ago
    In this case I can totally believe it’s innocuous. But as I said, it happens a lot. It happens on Firefox evangelism threads, Chrome bashing threads, DDG evangelism threads, Google bashing threads, etc. where a direct comparison is made. Imagine reading “hey C++ programmers, check out Rust, we have this amazing feature called zero cost abstractions!” over and over. Just really tiring.
    - doublesCs 6y ago
      Notice that we still have decent overlap: we both get annoyed when someone mentions ddg when doing it on the browser is obviously better :-)
      - oefrha 6y ago
Noumenon72 6y ago
Once you get used to keyword searches, here are some other handy ones. It's like having a CLI to the Internet. gm Google Maps t thesaurus.com u YouTube (for music) pron for porn (after setting up a Google custom search engine that searches your favorite tube sites -- https://developers.google.com/custom-search https://developers.google.com/custom-search) gi for Google Images r for Reddit (the site search has gotten better -- I used to use Google "site:reddit.com %s" instead). My only problem with these is somehow the Wayback Machine doesn't work when I put https://web.archive.org/form-submit.jsp?url=%s https://web.archive.org/form-submit.jsp?url=%s.

clairity 6y ago

yah, keywords are such a great but probably underutilized feature of firefox. i set up 'wiki' and a bunch of others when i started using firefox over a decade ago. i still use most today, although i've pointedly replaced google with duckduckgo ('g') long ago as well.

boogies 6y ago

This, but also, when you're stuck on Chromium, change the default search to DuckDuckGo or Searx and use !w or !wp to search Wikipedia (and !s !sp if you want Google results for some reason, and !g or !go if you want Google results with a filter bubble).

boogies 6y ago
Addendum: sorry to imply you can't also use keywords there, thanks to oefhra for reminding me you can https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23478553 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23478553

ma2rten 6y ago

In chrome you can type en.wikipedia.org and hit tab. For me it will autocomplete if you just type en.

delecti 6y ago
The default is the whole domain (and it also works with other sites, like "amazon.com query"), but you can also change the keyword for it. For several years I've had "wp" as the keyword for wikipedia searches, and it works in both Firefox and Chrome. I just type "wp whatever my query is", no tab needed, and it will take me directly to the result.

oefrha 6y ago

Chrome has had custom search engine keywords since day one (yes, I actually went to locate a day-one article on this feature[1]). Not sure why every time this topic comes up someone has to mention it as if it’s some sort of Firefox secret sauce, complete with weird replies like if you are “stuck on Chromium” you can emulate this with a pointless round trip to DuckDuckGo. [1] https://searchengineland.com/searching-with-google-chrome-omnibox-14664 https://searchengineland.com/searching-with-google-chrome-om...

airstrike 6y ago
Agreed. I've had "en" as my keyword for Wikipedia searches on Chrome since 2008...
doublesCs 6y ago
> Not sure why every time this topic comes up someone has to mention it as if it’s some sort of Firefox secret sauce If you're not sure I can clarify that for you. I was responding to someone talknig about ddg, and I was showing a better way of doing it. I didn't know that it's possible with Chrome because I don't use it.
- oefrha 6y ago
  In this case I can totally believe it’s innocuous. But as I said, it happens a lot. It happens on Firefox evangelism threads, Chrome bashing threads, DDG evangelism threads, Google bashing threads, etc. where a direct comparison is made. Imagine reading “hey C++ programmers, check out Rust, we have this amazing feature called zero cost abstractions!” over and over. Just really tiring.
  - doublesCs 6y ago
    Notice that we still have decent overlap: we both get annoyed when someone mentions ddg when doing it on the browser is obviously better :-)
    - oefrha 6y ago

Noumenon72 6y ago

Once you get used to keyword searches, here are some other handy ones. It's like having a CLI to the Internet. gm Google Maps t thesaurus.com u YouTube (for music) pron for porn (after setting up a Google custom search engine that searches your favorite tube sites -- https://developers.google.com/custom-search https://developers.google.com/custom-search) gi for Google Images r for Reddit (the site search has gotten better -- I used to use Google "site:reddit.com %s" instead). My only problem with these is somehow the Wayback Machine doesn't work when I put https://web.archive.org/form-submit.jsp?url=%s https://web.archive.org/form-submit.jsp?url=%s.