Dan just recently added the ability to batch edit keyword tags in Unalog, his infinitely useful social bookmarking application (can you tell I’m a fan?). So like a good metadata, cataloging, programming librarian I decided now was the time to start cleaning up some of those wildly divergent keyword tags I’ve been assigning. After all, how else will I ever find what I want?

In the process, I discovered a link to an old Slashdot story on A9. What was more interesting than the A9 story itself, though, was a simple Firefox trick (mentioned in the /. comments) that I’d been unaware of up until now (or, if I ever was aware of it, I didn’t recognize its usefulness). It seems that by assigning a keyword to your Firefox bookmarks you can provide a quick and easy way to search sites on the web (well, sites that take a simple HTTP GET as their search initiator).

So, for instance, if you want to add a shortcut to search Google from your location bar, create a bookmark named Google Search with the URL: http://www.google.com/search?q=%s Next assign that bookmark the keyword ‘g’. This way you can type “g unalog” (without the quotes) in the location bar and Firefox will send that search to Google, returning to you the results of that search.

How very convenient. What I think is neater though is that I can search Unalog in the same way. Unalog takes a search in the form of: http://unalog.com/search?q= If you bookmark that, add a %s to the end of that URL, and assign the keyword ‘u’ to the Firefox bookmark, then you can search Unalog directly from within Firefox by typing “u google” into the location bar — this will search for links related to Google in the Unalog database.

Up until now I’ve been going to the Unalog site first and then searching. This saves me a big (unnecessary) step. What is also nice about Unalog (since I’m on the topic) is that I can do fast fielded searches as well. For example: “user:ksclarke AND (Gnome OR tag:swt)” returns a nice set of resources — I can limit by date, by bookmarker, by tag or title (see search hints for more options). Hooray for Unalog; hooray for Firefox!