My search shortcuts
Similar to Kilian Evang, I have also set up various search shortcuts, but not with the help of Trovu like Kilian, but using the browser’s own function. In Chrome it is under “Settings” – “Search Engine”, in Firefox it is somewhat hidden under “Bookmarks” – “Manage Bookmarks” – “Other Bookmarks”. In both browsers you can set the abbreviations yourself. (In Firefox, you can do this by clicking in the search field on the respective page, opening the context menu and selecting “Add a keyword for this search …”.) If I enter “wde Meerkat”, it takes me straight to the German-language Wikipedia entry about meerkats .
The abbreviations I use most often:
wen for the English Wikipedia, wde for the German, wfr for the French dewikt and enwikt for the German and English Wiktionaryduden for looking up at duden.comsyn and thes for synonyme.woxikon.de and thesaurus.comso for stackoverflowforvo for forvo.com, pronunciation of English wordsimdb for the Internet Movie Databasekym for knowyourmeme.comud for urbandictionary.com
What used to be important (or never was, but I thought it was important enough for its own search shortcut):
amde, amuk and amcom for Amazon Germany, UK and USA (no longer used since 2020, I have an “ebay” search shortcut instead, which I never use because eBay is one of the few things that are really used a lot in the app work better than in the browser and that’s why I practically only use it on my cell phone)alfie: Search in Google Books between 1950 and 1965, for a book translation (Today I would use the Open Library’s full-text search for this in most cases because I use the Open Library likes and because unlike Google Books you get a readable result and not a screenshot of half a sentence. But searching within a limited period of time is still easier with Google Books.)ddg for duckduckgo (didn’t work for me) sfb for eurobuch.com, search for used books (I actually look for that more often than before, but I still forget that this shortcut exists) fl, flcc and flvcc: flickr, flickr images with CC licenses, Flickr videos with CC licenses (the photo platform Flickr hasn’t played a role in my life for a long time, and I find images with CC licenses easier elsewhere)gr for goodreads.com (I always have a Goodreads tab open anyway and then search directly there) leo and ling for leo.com and linguee.de, a dictionary and… I don’t even remember what linguee.de used to be and what I used it for. Since 2017 I have been covering my translation needs with Google Translate.php for the documentation of the PHP programming language on php.net (used often in the past, I now search via stackoverflow, which covers all programming languages) tw and twf for Twitter searches and Twitter searches only in the tweets of people I follow (obsolete since I’m no longer on Twitter) wqde and wqen for Wikiquote German and Wikiquote English (I don’t use them anymore because I never found what I was looking for there anyway).
I often miss my keyboard shortcuts in Firefox on my phone. Maybe you can set it up there somehow, but I haven’t been patient enough to figure out how to do it yet.
(Kathrin Passig)