Tip: Use Firefox Smart Keyword Search on Amazon

I love Amazon. I’ve been a customer since the first month the store went live. But there are some aspects of its site design which drive me bats.

For example, I used to be able to go to www.amazon.com, type a search phrase in the box and have a list of matching books displayed. That was in the days when Amazon was nothing but a book store. These days, searches default to searching everything - books, gardening tools, music, toys, groceries, and so on. To narrow the search, you must first select a store from the drop-down list and then type the search phrase.

I could, of course, bookmark the Amazon Book Store instead of the main Amazon front page and use it as my starting point, but I like the front page. I want it and I want to be able to search books as the default.

Amazon could easily fix this by letting customers select a default search option, but I don’t see this happening any time soon. After all, it only took the company almost half a decade to add some basic commonsense to Wishlist organisation; it’s unlikely that search options are high on the list of site improvements heading our way.

More aggravating still is the omission of several ‘stores’ from the search list. For example, you won’t find the classical music store on the drop-down list. If you select Music from the drop-down list and type in a search phrase, the results are pulled from both the classical and non-classical stores. And yet, if you navigate directly to the Music store, you’ll find there are separate searches available for classical and non-classical discs. Using the classical-specific search makes it far easier to find what you’re after. A number of other stores, such as the camera shop, are also omitted from the front-page search list.

Firefox to the rescue

Fortunately, we don’t have to wait for Amazon to improve its search. Instead, we can use Firefox to roll our own search engines.

One of Firefox’s most delightful features is a thing called Smart Keyword Search. Smart Keyword Search lets you perform site-specific searches directly from the Firefox location bar (aka address box). You can create a Smart Keyword Search for any site that has its own search box and, when it comes to Amazon, you can create separate Smart Keywords for each Amazon ‘store’.

So, for example, you can create a Smart Keyword for the Amazon Book store, one for the Amazon Music store and yet another for the Amazon Classical Music store. If you’re into software or apparel or toys, you can create your own searches for those stores, too.

Here’s how:

1. Visit the site you want to search and navigate to the page containing the appropriate search box.
2. Right-click in the search box and choose Add A Keyword For This Search from the pop-up menu.
3. Fill in the Add Bookmark dialog box, providing a descriptive name and a short keyword. It doesn’t really matter where you store the keyword within your bookmarks, although I find it handy to create a separate Keywords folder and put them all in there. That way, I can easily check what keywords I’ve created.
4. Once you click OK, you can start using your keyword immediately. Simply type the keyword followed by your search phrase in Firefox’s location bar and press Enter. You’ll be taken to the results page on the site.

Custom searches

If you want to make your own keywords for Amazon, all you have to do is select the appropriate store from the drop-down list and then right-click in the search box to create a keyword. For those stores not listed on the front page, use the Shop All Departments links to navigate to the appropriate store, select the correct sub-search from the drop-down list and then create your keyword.

I now have half a dozen Amazon searches I can perform any time without first visiting Amazon.com: ab for books; amus for classical music; apop for general music; amusi for musical instruments; and asnap for the camera shop. I can also search the whole of Amazon by simply typing as followed by the search phrase.

You can take this trick and apply it to any search service you like.