Have you ever desired to visit a site or search a site without typing in the entire web address or visiting the site first? Bookmarks in Firefox can be assigned simple keywords to make browsing and searching quicker. The feature of Bookmark Keywords has been available for a while now, but many people have not taken advantage of it. All you need is the free Internet browser Firefox!

To get started simply create a new bookmark in Firefox (Rt-Click your Bookmark toolbar or "Bookmarks" menu > "Bookmark this Page"). The "New Bookmark" window should pop-up. Let’s say you love this post so much that you want to go to it alot. Type favpost in the "Keyword" field and hit "Ok." Now open up a new tab (CTRL+T) and type favpost in the "Address Bar" (where you normal type in the website address). Woah, it went to this post! That is because Firefox created a shortcut keyword for the term favpost. Now think of the possibilities. New York Times Homepage => nyt, Flickr => f, and Scroggles! => s!.

Well as if that wasn’t enough, you can actually add a dynamic parameter into the bookmark keyword. For example, I use the Google I’m Feeling Lucky feature alot which goes to the first/top result for any search on Google. If I want to go to a high-ranked "PHP Tutorial" site, I would type gg PHP Tutorial into the address bar. I setup a bookmark with the keyword gg. The URL/Location is set to: http://google.com/search?q=%s&btnI=I%27m+Feeling+Lucky
The %s in the Location address is term that Firefox replaces without whatever follows the keyword & space, [gg ], in my example PHP Tutorial. Again the possibilities are endless. Need to look at a specific tag sorted by most interesting in Flickr? You could use: flint => http://www.flickr.com/photos/tags/%s/interesting/.

Here is a list of bookmark shortcuts that I enjoy using:

• Google Search: g => http://www.google.com/search?q=%s
• Google Map Search: gmap => http://maps.google.com/maps?oi=map&q=%s
• Yahoo! Search: y => http://search.yahoo.com/search?&p=%s
• Wikipedia Search: wp => http://en.wikipedia.org/?search=%s
• Definr: def => http://definr.com/%s
• Lifehacker: lh => http://www.lifehacker.com
• Gmail: mail => https://mail.google.com
• Weather Search: we => http://www.wunderground.com/cgi-bin/findweather/getForecast?query=%s
• PHP: php => http://www.php.net/%s
• TinyURL creator: tiny => http://tinyurl.com/create.php?url=%s

Which ones do you use? Any cool quick shortcuts like the tiny url creator with tiny? Post in the comments.

If you sync your bookmarks across computers with the free Foxmarks extension for Firefox, you can access your custom shortcuts everywhere!

UPDATE: I forgot to write that CTRL+L (in Firefox) will put the cursor into the Address Bar for easy typing. CTRL+K will move the cursor to the search box.