Google is a good search engine; there's really no use arguing against its popularity. Google does certainly have its detractors when it comes to its information gathering and privacy policies, but it still manages to hold down roughly 80 percent of the search engine market, according to some recent numbers.
Still, regardless of how much you like Google, there are times when it just isn't the best option. Let's say you want to look for an album on the Amazon MP3 website. In that case, it really makes more sense to go there, then perform the search. Google would more than likely give you the correct results, but they would be intermixed with results from other websites. And the same goes for looking for articles on Wikipedia, photos on Flickr, or any other website with its own particular specialty.
There are ways to use Google to search only a particular domain, but it takes a bit more effort to use, and speaking personally, isn't always something that gets thought of first. For Linux users who use the KDE desktop environment and Rekonq or Konqueror as their web browser, however, the idea of web shortcuts makes targeting your search results even quicker.
We talked about setting up a new search engine in Google Chrome in a recent article, and in that article talked about using keywords. In Google Chrome, if you had "ask" set up as your keyword for searching Ask.com, you would simply need to type "ask" and then the space bar, and Chrome would search that website (Ask.com in this case), for whatever you typed next, instead of using Google.
Rekonq has the same feature. More accurately, KDE has the feature – and makes it available system-wide, and both Rekonq and Konqueror support the feature. Make the change in the System Settings or in a particular browser's preferences and the change is carried over to the other browsers that support the feature. Here's how to configure those web shortcuts in KDE.
First, open up your System Settings by finding it in the Start menu (under Settings), or clicking its icon if it's in your Favorites panel already, as shown below.
Now click the Account Details control panel, which you can see below includes settings for Password & User Account, Paths, KDE Wallet, Social Desktop and Web Shortcuts.
We want the Web Shortcuts settings, so click its tab when the Account Details panel loads.
The first thing you'll want to do, obviously, is ensure that web shortcuts are active. So if you see the checkbox is unchecked and the shortcuts grayed out, click the checkbox to enable shortcuts.
Once enabled, you have the option to use only the web shortcuts you want. To identify them, click their checkbox. This will lessen the possibility of using a shortcut when you don't mean to, as well as giving you a more refined group of shortcuts to use. And since there are almost 150 web shortcuts defined already, you shouldn't have much of a problem finding a handful that you think will be useful.
To edit a shortcut, highlight it in the list and hit the Change button. A window similar to this will appear.
Here you can change the search URI used, as well as the shortcut (or shortcuts, as each search engine can have multiple shortcuts, as shown above). You can't change the search provider name at this point, but if you really want a new name, you could simply create a new shortcut, copy all the information from the existing one to the new shortcut, then delete the old one.
You can do a couple other things from the Web Shortcuts panel as well. You can set the default search engine for the browsers who use this setting, for instance. Make the change here and Rekonq will use your setting when typing a search in the URL bar.
You also have the option to choose how keywords are triggered by configuring the delimiter. You have two options: a colon or a space.
Once all your changes have been made and the shortcuts configured, how do you go about using them while browsing? It's easy, as long as you remember the shortcuts and the use the correct trigger.
In a supported browser like Rekonq or Konqueror, simply type the shortcut you want (for instance, "7d" for the 7Digital MP3 store), and then the delimiter. As shown below, we typed "7d" and then a colon. This was the delimiter that triggered the web shortcut, so when we did this, the search bar changed to acknowledge that we are now using a shortcut. Had we used a space as our delimiter, we would have needed to type "7d" and then a space before the web shortcut activated. Typing the colon – in that case – would simply have searched for "7d:phish" in Google, which we did not want.
When we finally hit enter after typing in our search, we are not taken to a Google search results page, but to the website we were searching.
This is a lot handier than using Google to accomplish the same thing, as there is effectively no middle man.
Of course, there are still times when Google is the best option. It doesn't have its 80 percent market share for no reason, after all! Still, using web shortcuts can really cut down on the time you spend searching. It should make you more efficient, help you target your searches so the only results you see are from the pages you want. It takes a bit of configuring so the shortcuts are memorable to you, but the speed you should see makes it worth the time in our view.
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