How to Search Really Fast from Mozilla Firefox Address Bar

So during a friendly discussion at work, somebody casually mentioned muon particles and now you want to find all about this part of the physics. Most people will just enter the search term in the address bar of their web browser and press Enter. This will display all the search results in the web browser and from here you can click on the Wikipedia link about the muon particles (or something else). But Firefox users do not have to take all these steps. Firefox users can go straight to the Wikipedia article about whatever they are searching using a little known feature of their browser.

In Firefox, if you want to search for something on Wikipedia, all you have to do is enter @wikipedia followed by a space and then the search phrase in the address bar. It will lead you straight to the Wikipedia page for that thing that you are looking for. If Wikipedia page does not exist about it, then it will show the Wikipedia search results about it.

Firefox Search

You can use the same trick for searching Google, Bing, DuckDuckGo, Amazon, Wikipedia and Twitter. For example, you can enter “@bing ubuntu” to search for Ubuntu using Bing the search engine, or “@amazon toshiba satellite” to search Amazon.com for Toshiba laptops. All these search engines come pre-installed with Firefox and you can look the up in the settings by entering about:preferences#search in Firefox address bar. You will find all the one-click search engines listed there.

Firefox Search

If you add more search engines and these search engines are added with a keyword, then you have to use that keyword without the @ sign. For example, I added Yahoo! search in Firefox and it adds the search engine with “Yahoo” keyword. Now you cannot search using “@yahoo”, but you have to use just “yahoo” keyword, for example, if you want to search for pizza, then you have to enter “yahoo pizza” instead of “@yahoo pizza”.

Firefox Search

You can add many more search engines to Firefox either by visiting the homepage of those search engines or by visiting Firefox add-ons webpage at https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/search/?type=search.