We’ve long sung the praises of Google’s site-specific searches, but unless you create a bookmark with a keyword, Firefox’s awesomebar doesn’t like the site: search operator. Reader shows us how to make it work.
We’ve said in the past that to search a site like Lifehacker from Google, you just need to type site:lifehacker.com.au search terms into Google. In Chrome, this works just fine from the address bar, but Firefox’s address bar gets confused and throws you an error message saying “Firefox doesn’t know how to open this address, because the protocol (site) isn’t associated with any program”. Ri59 explains a nice workaround:
The way to put it in is search term site:whatever.com, which is opposite I believe of the way Google.com used to do it. Google.com accepts both ways now at least.
That’s it. Instead of putting the site: operator at the beginning of your search, which makes Firefox thing it’s part of a URL, stick it in after your search terms and Firefox will send it to Google without a problem. Of course, if you search a site often, you can just bookmark it and give it a search keyword, but this is nice on the occasions you need to search a site you don’t use as often.
Republished from Lifehacker