Firefox search on steroids

If you’re anything like me, the one Firefox feature that you probably use most is the embedded search tool in the top-right corner.

Good as it is, this handy tool can still be improved, with an excellent extension called Inquisitor. Once installed into Firefox, Inquisitor assists you in your online searches in several ways: it complete words and sentences, suggests new keyword combinations, shows a text snippet of the first results and offers direct links to other more specific search engines.

Inquisitor offers all these new features in an elegant, glossy black interface which looks really attractive – but which cannot be customized in any way. What the extension does let you customize is a bunch of configuration settings, where you can tweak the auto-complete functionality, set the number of results to be displayed and add new search engines.

This final option in Inquisitor is particularly interesting, as it not only includes links to a dozen popular searchable sites (Wikipedia, Youtube, Flickr!, IMDB, BBC, Yahoo! Answers, Amazon…) but also lets you add your own in a very easy way. Simply copy the standard search URL used in your favorite sites and replace the keyword with “” (without the extra blank spaces, that is). So for example, in the case of Softonic this would be http://en.softonic.com/s/

One last point: please take your time to check Inquisitor’s settings, because it’s configured to send usage statistics to Yahoo! and you may not be happy about that.

If you use Firefox search a lot, you’ll love Inquisitor: an eye-catching extension that adds great new features to an already awesome tool.