A lot of the searches I do every day are navigational. What this means in plain English is that I do a search to find a particular web page/site and then just navigate to it. This is in contrast to the exploratory searches where I usually end up visiting more than one of the search results. Navigational search does not imply that I know beforehand which page to go to, it might be that I had a hunch such a page would exist or I discover that from the search results. Some examples of the former are when I want to navigate to the page that discusses a particular topic on Wikipedia or a the page of particular movie/actor on IMDB; the later happens when I find such pages in the search results. Because of a couple of beautiful features in Firefox and Google, I end up not seeing the search result pages at all for most of the navigational searches.
In Firefox, if you type in any text in the address bar which is not a valid URL, it defaults to a search for that text on Google. Even better, it defaults to the “I’m Feeling Lucky” search on Google. So if there is one particular page which seems to fit the search very well, you are directly taken to it instead of being shown the search results. If no such page exists, regular Google search results are shown. I have noted that not many people use this very useful feature, not even the highly technical inclined. So I thought it would be a good idea to record this here.
Here are some examples of good navigational queries (type in Firefox address bar, without the quotes):
“imdb the godfather” or even just “the godfather”!
“wikipedia grok” or “wiki grok” or even just “grok”!
“bob dylan last.fm”
“lyrics stairway to heaven”
If you feel that “I’m Feeling Lucky” is too aggressive, you might want to switch to Google’s “Browse By Name” or even the regular Google search from the Firefox address bar. This page explains the how.
2 Comments
A lot of times I don’t like the “I am feeling lucky” feature of Firefox. I prefer to have a lot of results before me and chose the pages myself. It makes me feel good that way. So, I mostly use the search engines box in Firefox. When I am sure where to look for data (wikipedia, IMDB..), I can chose those engines from the list.
The ‘I am feeling lucky’ feature is in fact more useful to me when I know where to look for data: I just type my query with that site name and Google directly takes me to the correct page on that site; where as, using the site searches (which are slow) present me with a set of matching pages (except Wikipedia). I find this immensely useful for Wikipedia, IMDB and CPAN.
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