Finding bookmarked and visited pages quickly in Firefox.

Location Bar search

Search modifiers

I’ve been using the web since 1994 (Mosaic, Lynx, etc., yay!) so it takes quite a bit to change my usage. The Awesome Bar was, well, awesome when it came out but I’ve always found the bookmark finding mechanism a bit unwieldy.

So, when I found that there were search modifiers a week or so ago I was happy and have found that over the last week or so it has helped me a lot, streamlining the process to finding bookmarked or previously visited pages (ones in my history).

Most used bookmark search modifiers

This MozillaZine page gives the full run down but my usage has so far been limited to these modifiers:

• “* keyword other” – find bookmarks with keyword and other related to them
• “^ keyword other” – find pages in history with the keywords related to them
• “# keyword other” – find pages in history or bookmarks with keywords in the title only

Least used bookmark search modifiers

Like I said, there are others but these the ones above I’ve used the most. For completeness the others are:

• “@ keyword other” – keywords in URL
• “+ keyword other” –  keywords are tags
• “~ keyword other” – keywords were typed in by user
• “% keyword other” – keyword relates to currently open tab (from version 3.7 onwards)

Most useful, hope you find them useful too.