This Firefox extension adds a "Yahoo! Search" item in Firefox's View | Sidebar
menu (Alt+Y is the shortcut key) that opens a sidebar tailored for Web searching with Yahoo! Search.

Screenshot

Personally, I like it because it gives me a compact representation of search results and I can get a "bird's-eye view" of 30 results even without scrolling, whereas a regular Web search typically shows me 2 results without scrolling and 10 with scrolling. If the sidebar has focus (if it doesn't, hit F6), then you can navigate with the keyboard by using the arrow keys or the number keys.

Features

• Ctrl+K focuses on the search text box like in Firefox and Thunderbird.
• Alt+Y shows and hides the sidebar (this extension also plays nicely with the Grippies extension).
• The column selector in the top right of the sidebar allows you to control which columns are displayed (although the screen real estate for the sidebar is limited by the browser).
• You don't have to press Enter when you enter your search term – a second or so of inactivity is all it takes, so you can just type a word or two and get instant feedback.

Limitations

• There is no support yet for spelling suggestions.
• It only works with Web Search - I haven't delved into Images, Local, etc… I may do these at some point, but if you do these before me (or any other enhancements), please send me the code so that I can incorporate it into the distribution.

How does it work?

It's using JavaScript to access Yahoo's Web Services API. If you want to check it out in depth, unzip the .xpi file and the .jar file contained within the chrome/ directory. Inside the content/ directory, you'll find the XUL and JavaScript code, which is very straightfoward. I think you'll find it easy to extend the code or to take some of the ideas and use them in your own applications.

Contribute

Send me feature suggestions, or even better, send me code that implements new features! You can find my contact info at http://marc.abramowitz.info

Install latest .xpi