Targeted Website Searches with Firefox

By now, everyone knows that Mozilla’s Firefox is eating away at Internet Explorer’s market share.  It’s no wonder, innovation of Internet Explorer creeps along with releases of the Windows operating system.  In true open source spirit, Firefox allows for anyone with a little know-how to contribute and improve the product.  Case in point is the Mozilla mycroft project, home to browser search plug-ins, which "allow you to access a search engine right from your browser without having to go to the search engine’s page first." It’s pretty handy–I use it to search Amazon, track Fedex packages, look up entries in the  Wikipedia, etc.  Quite often, I need to google something at Columbia University, so today I wrote a Firefox plug-in that will google those pages.  I’ve submitted the plug-in to the folks at the mycroft project, but in the meantime, you can download the zip file.  To install on the Mac, you’ll need to drop it in: /Applications/Firefox.app/Contents/MacOS/searchplugins  On the PC, drop the files in:  C:\Program Files\Mozilla Firefox\  Happy searching. (Thanks to Alan Bramley, who originally developed this plug-in for the University of Virginia.  I modified his work for the Columbia University plug-in.)

 

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