Quicksilver tip: Quick, targetted web searches
Alisdair McDiarmid has produced a walk-through 
for one of Quicksilver’s lesser-known but very powerful time-saving tricks—executing very fast web searches in Wikipedia, on Amazon, news sites or wherever.
I knew Quicksilver could do this, but hadn’t forced myself to experience how good it is until today.
By highlighting some text and pressing ⌘-E, you can copy text to Mac OS X’s shared find clipboard.
Then, by bringing up Quicksilver and selecting a web search bookmark (there are hundreds of pre-made ones to choose from for every imaginable query), you can search your web site of choice in seconds:
Now I can find books on Amazon, the latest news from the BBC on the rise and rise of Borat, definitions for obscure technical terms and acronyms on Wikipedia, words in the Oxford English Dictionary or software on MacUpdate in much less than a tenth of the time it took me yesterday.
And so can you.
[Props also to Allan Odgaard of TextMate fame whose walk-through on this feature seems to be the original.]
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Tags: Apple Mail Tips, books, news, not apple mail, Productivity, quicksilver, time saving, tricks, web searches
November 16th, 2006 at 10:35 pm
As a keyboard junkie, I find the “search from address bar” approach quicker and more versatile. The free Parang plugin for Safari works nicely, and you can add your own searches with ease. Plus for being able to define what spaces should be replaced with (+, %20, | etc.)
November 17th, 2006 at 6:29 am
Another cool trick, you can use a comma (,) to select multiple sites to search. For example, typing
goo [,]imdb[Enter]Borat[Enter] will open two tabs in Safari, one for Google and another for IMDB with the search results for Borat. Take that, Dogpile!November 17th, 2006 at 7:41 am
That is a very cool trick! Thanks.
November 17th, 2006 at 12:09 pm
I never knew about the “Use Selection for Find” nor the comma to do double searches in QS.
Thanks!
November 17th, 2006 at 3:24 pm
[...] Hat tip: Hawk Wings Filed under: Computers, Productivity Software on Nov 16,06 | Tags: productivity, Quicksilver, shortcuts, web search. [...]
November 19th, 2006 at 12:39 pm
I’m stuck at the point where I need to hit return twice. I get sent to the search website’s main page without substituting the search term from the shared clipboard. Help! What am I missing?
Thanks in advance for your responses. This looks like an amazing shortcut.
November 20th, 2006 at 8:53 pm
Yacarib: it could be that the default action in your Quicksilver setup is “Open URL”. You can fix this, though.
Try hitting tab instead of the first return. This should take you to the action selection. Hit the down arrow, look for “Search For…”, then ctrl-click that item and select “Make Default”. Then you should be able to go for the return-return shortcut.
November 20th, 2006 at 11:19 pm
No luck yet. Here’s what I have so far.
I have “wiki” selected as the default in Quicksilver for “http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Search?search=***”
I then ⌘-E the word Quicksliver on this web page. I want to test finding Quicksilver in Wikipedia.
Then I active Quicksliver and type wiki. OK so far.
I tried your recommendation, but don’t see the “Search For…” as an option.
Other recommendations? Thanks in advance.
November 21st, 2006 at 3:32 am
Do you have the “Web Search Module” plugin installed in QS?
November 21st, 2006 at 1:01 pm
Thanks ClunkClunk!! That worked like a charm.
Thanks also Alisdair.