I love using Firefox keywords. They're one of the most useful tools invented. So if I want to search Wikipedia for something, I have bookmarked http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%s, assigned it the keyword "wiki" and now just typing "wiki mauritania" will take me directly to the Wikipedia entry for that country.
I also like checking the CIA World Fact Book. This nifty guide presents a bunch of bared-boned statistics about a country to give you a good feel for the business and political situation in the country. Very stat heavy. Unfortunately, I can't create a Firefox keyword for it because I'd have to remember that Mauritania is abbreviated "mr": http://www.cia.gov/cia/publications/factbook/geos/mr.html. Other countries have similar entries. France is "fr" while Taiwan is "tw". I consult the Fact Book often enough that this annoyed me.
That's when I realized how easy this really is to solve. Google's "I'm Feeling Lucky" will always take me to the correct CIA World Factbook page merely by typing in "cia world fact book $country". Thus, my bookmark URL: http://www.google.com/search?q=cia+world+fact+book+%s&btnI=I'm+Feeling+Lucky. Now, "cia $country" will do what I want it to do.
For my Wikipedia keyword, I prefer the URL http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Search?search=%s – if there’s an exact match, that will send you to the right page, if not, it produces a list of search results. That’s more helpful than a Wikipedia does not have an article with this exact name page with a bunch of canned links.
Re:
Ovid on 2006-01-07T00:22:00
I just discovered that FF has a built-in shortcut for that: wp @search_terms. I found that when I was trying to fix my shortcut to match your suggestion
:) Re:
Aristotle on 2006-01-07T00:58:55
Huh. Maybe I should start over with a fresh profile someday. This one is from the days of Firebird.
:-) And the bookmarks, in fact, have been travelling along since IE5 on Win95. In the process of slowly moving the stuff I bookmarked as keepers over to del.icio.us I recently found some stuff going back as far as ’99ish in there.
http://www.google.com/search?q=site:cia.gov+world+fact+book+%s&btnI=I'm+Feeling+ Lucky.