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Location Bar search

From MozillaZine Knowledge Base

When you type a keyword into the Location Bar, Firefox does text string searching within your history and bookmarks. Results are displayed in a drop down list. The drop-down list results show you the page’s favicon, the full title, the URL, and whether you have bookmarked or tagged the page in a richly formatted two-line display.

You can restrict what kind of results are shown in the drop down list by using customizable characters. Include the character anywhere in the address bar separated by spaces to have it restrict what results are displayed. The characters are as follows:

Preference names in about:config default key action
browser.urlbar.match.title # Returns results that match the text in the title.
browser.urlbar.match.url @ Returns results that match the text in the URL.
browser.urlbar.restrict.bookmark * Returns only results that are from the bookmarks.
browser.urlbar.restrict.history ^ Returns only results that are from the browser’s history.
browser.urlbar.restrict.tag + Returns only results that have been tagged.
browser.urlbar.restrict.typed ~ Returns only results that have been typed.

If you do not select a result from the drop-down list but just press enter, Firefox takes you to the top Google result for that search by default.

However, by modifying the preference called keyword.URL, you can change this behavior. Here are a few example values:

http://www.google.com/search?btnI=I%27m+Feeling+Lucky&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8&q=

Google's "I'm Feeling Lucky" (default pre-Firefox 2.0)

http://www.google.com/search?ie=UTF-8&sourceid=navclient&gfns=1&q=

Google "Browse by Name" (Automatically takes you to sites with a clear match, else performs a Google search) (default in Firefox 2)

http://www.google.com/search?ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8&q=

Google Search (Google search results page)

If the keyword.URL search is disabled, Firefox may still attempt a simpler lookup, by concatenating a prefix and suffix on the supplied domain name. This action may be enabled or disabled using the browser.fixup.alternate.enabled setting in about:config. The prefix and suffix used can be set using browser.fixup.alternate.prefix and ...suffix.

For more advanced search capabilities, you may want to look into using keyword searches and the Search Bar.

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See also

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External links

Retrieved from "http://kb.mozillazine.org/Location_Bar_search"