Smart Bookmarks

Introduction

Smart Bookmark in address bar dropdown menu

Fig. 1: Smart Bookmark in address bar dropdown menu

Smart Bookmarks are a special kind of bookmark that can take one or more arguments. By using Smart Bookmarks, web searches and queries can be performed without loading a query page first.

All of your Smart Bookmarks will appear in a dropdown menu if you enter some text in the address bar (Fig. 1). By selecting the Smart Bookmark, a query using the given text will be performed.

Smart Bookmark in a toolbar

Fig. 2: Smart Bookmark in a tolbar

It is also possible to add a Smart Bookmark to a toolbar by selecting »Show in bookmarks bar« in the bookmark's property dialog. If you do so, you will see its name and a text box (Fig. 2). You can enter text into the box and press enter to perform the function of the Smart Bookmark.

How do I create Smart Bookmarks?

Smart Bookmarks can be created by finding out what URI a site uses for searching, for example http://www.google.com/search?q=SEARCHITEM will start a Google query for SEARCHITEM.

To make this URI a Smart Bookmark, you have to follow three simple steps:

  1. Add a bookmark for http://www.google.com/search?q=SEARCHITEM
  2. Start the Bookmarks editor
  3. Replace SEARCHITEM with %s in the bookmark's properties dialog

Examples

To add a Smart Bookmark from a web page to your personal bookmarks, like this one: Google, just right click on the link and choose »Bookmark Link...«.

If you ever want to add a Smart Bookmark to a web page, you might want to take a look at the html source of the above example:

<a type="text/smartbookmark" href="http://www.google.com/" rel="http://www.google.com/search?q=%s" title="Google">Google</a>

Example Smart Bookmark HTML source

Smart Bookmarks Archive

An archive containing lots of Smart Bookmarks is available at the Galeon web site.

 

An epiphany in browsing.