I’ve been a Camino user ever since Joel introduced me to it.

As I’ve mentioned before, if you’re an Apple Firefox user, then Camino is perfect for you since it’s basically the Gecko engine (which is one of the major factors that made Firefox a popular choice) programmed using the Cocoa framework.

There really isn’t anything that sets it apart from Firefox, on the contrary I think Firefox still has more “features” when it comes to the extensions/plugins available to it. But if you chose Firefox because of its browsing capabilities, then Camino is said to be exactly like it… only faster – much faster!

Joel actually made some benchmarks of the different browsers, and the results speak for themselves.

A few days ago, Joel had mentioned the keyword search that seems to be a popular “power-user” feature built into browsers nowadays. Though the feature I would imagine, has been around for quite a while already, I personally have never tried it ’til yesterday… and not I’m posting about it. Go figure hehehe.

If you’re a non-IE user, then all other browsers you have encountered probably have 2 input fields: One would be your regular address field where you type in your URLs, and a specific “search-engine” field. The latter was probably implemented because of the fact that search engines are internet users’ best friends. If you know how to use them properly, then you can find practically anything.

But that’s an advanced way of looking at it. My point is, that the use of search engines have (or should) become second nature to anyone who uses the internet – that popular browsers nowadays have included a dedicated field in their software for easy, permanent access.

Enter keyword searching.

Visiting your favorite sites via keywords make sense. Given a site with a ridiculously long URL, instead of navigating to the bookmark (or God forbid; typing it manually), you can simply assign a keyword as a “shortcut” to it.

I myself have set “bp” as a keyword for www.bukaspalad.com. Two letters is simply faster than having to do a bunch of keystrokes or a series of clicks just to get to your bookmarks.

Now that you get the picture of keyword use benefits, did you know that you can search with that same feature?

I have now deleted the searchfield from my browser menubar/toolbar, because all I needed now was the addressbar alone to do both – which makes the browser look a lot “neater.”

If you know the correct URL syntax to put into your bookmarks, you can assign a keyword to it and just start searching by typing <keyword><space><search string>

In my case, finding “lorem ipsum” in a series of search contexts is now achieved by the typing the following in the addressbar:

• g bukas palad – searches anything related to bukas palad via Google
• img metallica cd – Searches for images of metallica cd (cds, albums, etc.) via Google Images.
• wiki lorem ipsum – Searches information about lorem ipsum via online encyclopedia (Wikipedia.org)
• vt interarchy – Searches/checks for the latest version of the software called Interarchy via VersionTracker.
• amazon shooting digital – Searches Amazon for a product called shooting digital
• nblog 20d – Searches this blog for any mention of 20d

These are some examples my search keyword setup. Obviously you can change keywords (g, img, wiki, vt, amazon, nblog, etc.) to anything you want – preferably the first word or letter/s that pop into your mind when you think about searching those sites.

The trick is knowing what URL those search queries are (since they’ll be bookmarks). The only thing to remember is that %s is your search string. So if you do a search for testing in Google, you get the resulting URL in the addressbar:

http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=testing

Of course, testing here, is your search phrase. So simply replace that with %s and save that URL as a bookmark (http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=%s) and assign it any keyword you want – then you’re good to go.

NOTE: This trick isn’t proprietary to Camino, it should be possible to do it similarly with any other browser provided they support a semblance of wildcard parsing and “bookmark keyword”-ing