Power of Firefox Bookmark "Keywords"

For those of you who are using Mozilla Firefox (and if you're not, you probably shouldn't be reading any of the other postings in this blog), one of the most time saving features I've found has been with bookmark keywords. Open the properties dialog for one of your bookmarks and try providing a keyword. Now in the address bar, just type in the keyword and, voila, your bookmarked page appears.

However... that's nothin'. The real power of the keywords comes in their use for search terms. The easiest way to describe this feature is with an example. Let's say you want to search ebay, but only for "Buy it Now" items. You also want to search descriptions and you want to sort by lowest price. And for this search, let's look for the "WRT54G" router. Once you perform the search, you get an URL such as
http://search-desc.ebay.com/wrt54g_W0QQcatrefZC6QQcoaction
ZcompareQQcoentrypageZsearchQQcopagenumZ1QQfromZR10QQfsooZ
1QQfsopZ3QQfstypeZ1QQftrtZ1QQftrvZ1QQftsZ2QQsacatZQ2d1QQsa
prchiZQQsaprcloZQQsascsZ2QQsbrbinZt

You'll notice our search term "wrt54g" shows up in the URL. You could easily copy and paste this URL replacing the text with "sanyo television" and get similar results. So lets apply this to the bookmark.

Create a bookmark for this eBay search. Set the Keyword to "ebay" and paste the URL in the "Location" field. Now, replace the text "wrt54g" with "%s". Now in your address bar, try "ebay panasonic speakers".