Unless you’ve been living under a rock you heard of Google Plus. The new social project from Google is exploding like crazy and has already suppressed 10 million users — that’s after 2 weeks with very limited invitations for the first one. So if anything, it’s going to grow even faster once Google fully opens it up. As users are exploring Google+ they’re finding out the ins and outs of the service and figuring out various shortcuts and tricks that can be used, in fact they even started a collaborative project to keep track of everything there is to know about Google+.
One of the tips that caught my eye was for searching Google+ posts and profiles right from Chrome’s url bar. I quickly realized that this is easily doable in Firefox as well. So here’s a quick guide to setting up the Firefox awesome bar to search Google+ posts and profiles.
Setting up Google+ search shortcuts in Firefox
To create custom searches accessible from the awesome bar you basically create a particular bookmark with a keyword, this is very similar to Chrome. So for Google+ posts search you do this:
- Open your “Show All Bookmarks” window (Ctrl+Shift+B) and browse to a folder where you’d like to keep the search shortcuts (bookmarks)
- Right-click inside the folder and select “New Bookmark…”
- Give your bookmark a name, something like “Search Google+ Posts”. I also like to add the keyword that I’ll use for the search in brackets as a quick reminder, like this, “[gp] Search Google+ Posts”
- In “Location” put this “http://www.google.ca/search?q=site:plus.google.com inurl:posts/* %s” (without the quotes)
- And in “Keyword” put the keyword you’re going to use for the search. In my example I used “gp” but you can use something else, as long as it’s one word (i.e. no spaces, commas, etc.) and of course it’s best to keep short, since that’s half the idea.
- Click “Add” and that’s it. So the way this shortcut works is, you’d go to the awesome bar, type in the keyword (“gp” in this case) followed by the search terms and hit enter, and it will take you to the search results.
To setup a search shortcut for Google+ profiles the process is very similar just with a different keyword and location. Here are the steps, slightly shortened:
- Open “Show All Bookmarks” window and create a new bookmark at a desired location
- Give it a name like “Search Google+ Profiles”
- Put the following url in location: http://www.google.ca/search?q=%s&tbs=prfl:e
- Put your desired keyword, like “profile”, or I use “gpp”
Now you can go to the awesome bar, type in the keyword for profile search followed by a name and it will display all matching Google+ users — magic! 
