Enhanced web searching in Firefox

For many people, the extent of their web searching in Firefox is typing ‘www.google.com’ in the address bar. Of course, this should return you plenty of relevant results, but there are plenty of tools and extensions for Firefox that improve the quality of your search results and make the whole process much quicker and easier. For instance, many power users turn to the iGoogle Sidebar to get customised content from the search engine giant directly to the side of their browser at all times.

The Googlepedia extension is another neat add-on for quickly finding facts and information about a particular subject, particularly if you make use of its ‘I’m Feeling Lucky’ feature to weasel out non-relevant results. Of course, Google is not the only search engine out there and it’s dangerous to rely too heavily on it. Organize Search Engines can be bolted onto Firefox to help you customise the search engine menu in the browser. Here, you’ll be able to place all your favourite search sites, giving you instant access to each of them.

OK, so these tools have made your searching quicker, now it’s time to improve the quality of your results and snuff out anything that’s not relevant. Install the BetterSearch extension and you can enhance search results from a range of engines by adding preview thumbnails, site info, quick previews and ‘Wayback Machine’ links to them. If you just want to search for stuff relevant to where you are in the world then try Loki, which determines your current position and lets you look for maps, business listings, and directions basedon your location.