James at James’ Coffee Blog published a good post in 2024 titled Search engine shortcuts in Firefox, which regular New Leaf Journal readers will know is a topic near and dear to my heart. James demonstrated how to add search engine shortcuts to Firefox using the search box (which, readers should note, is distinct from running searches in the omnibar address bar (HT to yoasif for the correction; see source in Firefox docs) and provided a nice tutorial on how to assign and use shortcuts to custom search engines. I strongly encourage people to take advantage of custom search engine functionality. It can be put to creative use. See, for example, the following articles on the subject I have published on NLJ:

• Adding noai.duckduckgo.com as Custom Search Engine (add the “No AI” version of DuckDuckGo)
• Performing Site-Specific Searches With DuckDuckGo (Custom shortcuts for domain-specific searches in DuckDuckGo, using Project Gutenberg as an example)
• Search Engine NLJ Domain Search Test (Similar to above but using NLJ as an example and featuring more search engines)
• Brave and DuckDuckGo Timer Search Shortcuts and Creating a Search Engine Shortcut For Google Timer (Replace your timer “app” with a custom search shortcut)
• Adding custom search shortcut for Wayback Machine (As advertised but I do not use this one)
• Wallabag Custom Search Engine Shortcuts (Search your Wallabag archive, the logic should also work with some other Read-It-Later tools)
• Custom Search Shortcut For Norton Safe Web (While I do not find this one useful, consider it a winner if you are a Norton Safe Web fan)

For fellow Firefox wielders out there, I recommend using Soufiane Sakhi’s Search Engines Helper extension for adding novel search engines (e.g., anything other than a search engine’s website’s default search). As I note in the articles, Chromium-based browsers make adding custom search engines easier and more intuitive than the Firefox family.