Add New Search Engines to Your Browser with the Mycroft Project

I remember clearly the first time I used Firefox. Visiting my also-in-grad-school brother during the summer of 2005, I was shocked to discover something called “tabbed browsing.” No longer would I have to open multiple windows in order to look at more than one website at once. Only slightly more revelatory in my experience of the then-six-months-old browser was that it had a search engine built in. Instead of going to Google’s website and then searching, I could just type a query into a window of the browser and I could save a step in my search. Mind. Blown.

In the years since, I’ve continued to make use of Google via the built-in search of Firefox, Chrome, and other modern browsers. And for the most part, Google helps me find what I’m looking for. But on occasion, I want to be a bit more selective with my search and use a particular search engine. This is pretty easy to do with Firefox as it includes seven search tools: Google, Yahoo, Bing, Amazon.com, eBay, Twitter, and Wikipedia. The first three will give you pretty similar results, but the last four are great for when you know that you’re shopping for something particular or trying to find only Wikipedia results.

Of course, sometimes you want to search even more specifically or wish that Firefox included a different search engine altogether. Wouldn’t it, for example, be handy to search Flickr, where we get most of the Creative Commons-licensed pictures we use on ProfHacker? And that probably goes double for Chrome which, of course, wants you to just use Google. Fortunately, there’s a way to add new search engines to both Firefox, Chrome, and even—gasp—Internet Explorer. The Mycroft Project is a repository of 19,000 different, user-created search engines.

When you get to the Mycroft Project—which is named for the brother of Sherlock Holmes—, you can simply type in the name of the site that you’re hoping to search or enter its URL. When looking for a Flickr search, for instance, you’ll get a number of different results.

As you’ll see, the results include a basic Flickr search but also different shades of search, including all the different flavors of Creative Commons licenses. Simply click on the name of the search that you would like to add to your browser. In both Chrome and Firefox you’ll get a pop-up box confirming that you’d like to add the particular search to your browser. (I assume that it works the same on Internet Explorer, but I’ve not had the chance to confirm it.) That’s it!

Now you can select the search engine with in the upper right corner of Firefox. And in Chrome, you can access it by typing the keyword that you set when adding the search. In the example below, I’ve set the keyword to the letters “fl.”

To do a Flickr search for “mushroom cloud,” I would simply type “fl mushroom cloud” into Chrome’s address/search bar. For the record, I use “Flickr CC – commderiv” for my posts on ProfHacker as The Chronicle is a commercial entity. For posts to my own blog or for talks I give, I use the “Flickr CC – deriv” search. You can similarly set short cuts in Firefox to speed up your searching even more.

I’ve been able to find a search engine for any site that I’ve ever wanted: Google Books, YouTube, WorldCat, Wiktionary, Urban Dictionary, Reddit, BoardGameGeek, eMusic, and more. Someone even built a search for Emory, just so I can search through all our websites faster. And to keep things meta, there’s a search engine for the Mycroft Project itself. So any time I think I might want to find a new search engine, I can look for it just that much faster.

What you can do with the Mycroft Project is so powerful that this is the third time it’s been covered on ProfHacker: first in my post about keyboard shortcuts for search in Firefox and second by Jason in a post about using Flickr to make better slides. But it’s never had top billing in a post, and I wanted to correct that.

What search engines do you wish you had built into your browser? Can you find them on the Mycroft Project? Let us know in the comments!

Lead image: Mushroom Cloud / http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/