Blake Perdue - Website & app reviews, and technology & startup commentary
Faster Search Using Bookmarks
There are a handful of websites, like Amazon and IMDB, that I constantly look things up on. If you want to know what rating a movie has on IMDB, you go to your browser address bar, type www.imdb.com, wait for the homepage to load, enter the movie name and click search. This is a 3 step process that can be reduced to 1 using a bookmark.
Instead of those 3 steps, I just type “m <movie name>” into my browser adress bar and hit enter and it takes me right to the search results on IMDB. Similarly, I type “a <product name>” to get results on Amazon. The trick is to create a bookmark that passes the “<movie name>” or “<product name>” text to the site you’re searching on.
To do this, visit your favorite site and search for something. For example, I searched for Donnie Darko on IMDB, which sent me to this URL:
http://www.imdb.com/find?s=all&q=Donnie%20Darko
Next, bookmark this page in your browser and then edit the bookmark properties. Change the keyword to the letter you want to use to search. I use “m” for IMDB and “a” for Amazon. Change the search terms (”Donnie%20Darko”) to “%s” like below.
Save the changes and you’re done. Now you can search using your bookmark. I can’t remember where I first learned this trick, but it has quickly become one of my favorites.
What tricks and hacks do you use to speed up your searches?
Comments
that a really usefull trick you sheared with us there.
The only trick I use is the speed dial function in the opera browser.
It saves you alot of time if you have some favorite websites that you visit a lot.
wow, that just saved me a lot of time. The only thing I knew to do was just type everything on google and go from there. Thank you.
I had no idea. This is a great time saver for those websites that you frequently visit. It would take some getting used to at first, but could really become a powerful tool. I can see myself using this frequently with Wikipedia for instance.
Is this something that will work in all browsers?
This is and awesome trick! I will try it right away. I also check product reviews for almost everything I buy on Amazon so this will be very useful. Thanks so much for the tip! 
Bookmarking on steroids! I really like this idea! I have TONS of favorites saved, so many that sometimes it’s faster to just type in the site name than click through my fav folders.
A pretty useful trick, I’ve used it for a while - and it’s really nice.
One thing one always has to remember when using a serach engine is that they aren’t really searching for a question moreso than they are searching for results.
Don’t type “What day is Christmas on this year?” instead type “Christmas 2009 is on”, I didn’t give the best example, but it helps considerably if you thing more along those lines.
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I’m surprised I didn’t know about this. The only tricks I really use is tabs. Clicking the mouse wheel on a link I want to view. Instead of looking at a web page and going back to look at another, I can open them all up at once.