Firefox keyword searches, and how to fix adding them

What are keyword searches?

Keyword searches, or quick searches, are really handy when browsing. If you think of something that you want to search for, they remove the extra step of first navigating to the site and selecting the search box.

Instead, you can just directly enter your query into your address bar, preceded by some keyword. For instance, if I look up "Ubuntu" on DuckDuckGo, I can just hit Ctrl+L to access the address bar, type d Ubuntu and hit enter, to directly access the page of search results.

How keyword searches save time

This might not seem like a big time saving, but when you consider that you have to repeat the same process for every site you search on, it soon adds up. It's a feature you can use not only with traditional search engines, but with most sites that have a search box. One example is YouTube, I'll often — maybe too often — type yt Yet another timewasting distraction.

Creating and using custom keyword searches in Firefox

This is really simple to do. You're really just adding a bookmark, but one that refers to whatever URL the search box will send you to, not the page itself.

1. Right click a search box on a webpage.
2. Select "Add a Keyword for this Search…"
3. In the dialogue that opens, enter a keyword and the search URL is then added to your bookmarks with a placeholder for a query.
4. When you next type that keyword followed by a search query into the address bar, the bookmark gets loaded with your query automatically inserted into the URL.

These keyword searches are normal bookmarks; you can edit them like any other bookmark. The only difference is that they contain the %s placeholder in the URL. When you carry out a keyword search, the term following the keyword replaces the %s in the bookmark.

If you're browsing through your bookmarks in the Library, you'll only see "Name", "Location" and "Tags", but if you click "More", you'll see (and can change) the keyword you've set too.

(This all works because, as you've probably noticed, using a search option on a site usually sends you to a URL that contains the search term. Hopefully you can see that if you construct the URL without even visiting the site first, that this should still work. That said, this assumes that the site uses GET requests where the query is contained in the URL itself.)

But my keyword searches aren't being added?

As I find them so useful, I sorely missed it when recently, for whatever reason, Firefox decided that it wouldn't add them any more.

The bookmark would get created, but the keyword I added didn't get saved. Even if I manually edited the bookmark, I could enter a keyword but on navigating away to another bookmark and back again, the keyword would be lost again.

The simple fix was just to exit Firefox, locate places.sqlite inside the Firefox profile directory,¹ rename places.sqlite, and let the file be rebuilt on the next restart (as documented in Mozilla's support pages).

The documentation states that you lose history, but any bookmarks are rebuilt from a backup. Once you're happy everything's OK, you can delete the old places.sqlite. After that, new keyword searches were added without a problem.