I was playing around a bit with my browser bookmarks tidying them up and such, when i came accross the Quicksearch feature which I had never really investigated before. This is specific to firefox or mozilla, which you should be using already anyways ;)

So here's how it works. There is a folder under bookmarks called "Quick Searches" which holds bookmarks to sites such as google or anywhere else that does searches and allows you to access these searches easily from your browser address bar. All you have to do is find the actual search page for that site and bookmark it, then just change the part of the url that contains your search parameter to "%s", and finally define a keyword which triggers this quicksearch.

Here's an example. I am constantly using dictionary.com as a resource to lookup words that I either don't know the meaning of, or have trouble spelling. So, to setup a quicksearch for dictionary.com I simply went to the site and did a search. Once the results came back I bookmarked the page into the "Quick Searches" folder, then went to edit that bookmark. I first substituted "%s" for my search term, and now the url stored in the bookmark looks like this "http://dictionary.reference.com/search?q=%s". The keyword that i decided on is "dict" and that's it, save and you're done. So from now on at any time I can go to my browser address bar and type "dict <some word>" and it will automatically go and search dictionary.com for the word i entered. very cool!