Add an image search option in Firefox Search box

If you search for images as much as you search for anything on the web, you might have wished for a shortcut like having an image search option from the search box of your browser directly. You generally open up Google Image Search or Yahoo Image Search to look for images. But having an image search option directly in the search box would be much convenient and time-saving.

If you use Firefox for browsing the web, it will be much easier. You will need to create a simple file with notepad that will act as a plugin for adding an Image search option in the Firefox search box. Google and Yahoo Image Searches are much popular than others so we’ll be discussing these two.

You will first need to understand the query URL of your search page. Like if you search for red flags in Google image search(http://images.google.com), your URL will look something like this:

http://images.google.com/images?q=red+flags

Here q is a variable and this variable gets the search query. Inside http://images.googlecom/images, the query for red flags runs. Now open a new notepad file and copy-paste the following code into it:

# Google Image Search

name=”Google Image Search”

description=”Search images with Google”

method=”GET”

action= “http://images.google.com/images” >

Now save this with a file name googleimagesearch.src to the directory: C:\Program Files\Mozilla Firefox\searchplugins. Now restart your Firefox browser and you’ll see a new search option with a name “Google Image Search” in the search box drop down. You can now search for images directly from Firefox search box. s

If you want to give a nice icon to your Google Image Search, you can create a 16px x 16px image and give it the same name, as here it would be googleimagesearch.gif. Now save this image in the same directory, C:\Program Files\Mozilla Firefox\searchplugins. Or you can simply use the Google Favicon in gif format and save it in the searchplugins directory with the name googleimagesearch.gif.

The trick is similar for Yahoo Image Search as well. The query URL of Yahoo is a bit different. If you search for “red flags” in Yahoo, your URL will look like this:

http://images.search.yahoo.com/search/images?q=red+flags

So, you’ll have to use the following code to create the .src file:

# Yahoo Image Search

name=”Yahoo Image Search”

description=”Search images with Yahoo”

method=”GET”

action= “http://images.search.yahoo.com/search/images” >

input name=”q” user>

So, with this trick, you can easily add a direct Image Search option to your Firefox search box.