Mozilla Adds One-Click Search to Firefox

Just one week after announcing its new royalty agreement with Yahoo, Mozilla has announced plans to allow users of the Firefox web browser to select their own search engines, improving the overall search experience significantly When a user types a search term into the Firefox search bar, they will be presented with a selection of search options that are pulled from the default search engine, as well as a series of buttons that will allow them to send the query to different search engines. For example, the user could click a button to send the query to Wikipedia or to search for a product on Amazon, or a person on Twitter. Firefox already ships with a selection of search engines pre-installed, with the search engines tailored to the language and locale of the user. For example, American users will have Yahoo as their default search engine, while Yandex will be the default for Russians, and Chinese users will be presented with Baidu as their default search engine.

Vertical Specific Search

By default, users will have the option to use Google, Bing, Amazon, DuckDuckGo, eBay, Twitter and Wikipedia as their default search engines. The browser maker is planning on also offering MDN, StackOverflow, Yelp and language-specific dictionary sites as possible search options, and users should be able to add their own search engines too. This easy one-click search targeting poses an interesting question for webmasters. Until relatively recently, Google was the resource that users turned to for everything. Now that is changing and users are spending more time using vertical specific search engines – especially for things like shopping. Directories, review sites and even store’s own search engines are becoming the go-to option for a lot of searches. As a webmaster, or the owner of a local business, you can capitalise on this by making sure that you have a good presence in those search engines. It is usually easier to rank well in a vertical specific search engine than it is to rank in Google itself, and often the vertical specific search engines are a better source of targeted traffic. That’s not to say that Google should be ignored, but if you have limited resources, it is worth focusing some time and energy on search services, directories and review sites that are specific to your niche because those sites will generate higher quality traffic for you.

 

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