This is a very short tutorial explaining how you can turn the address bar of popular Mac OS X web browser Camino into a quick search bar. I know there are widgets for searching, but I'm not comfortable with continually running such widgets on my Mac. So, I decided to find an alternative...
I find myself heading over to Dictionary.com quite a bit - I need to stop talking to people who use big words. I soon got tired of typing the URL out each time i decided to visit, so I looked for an alternative. Unfortunately, Camino doesn't allow you to customize the built-in address bar search... it comes as a Google searcher and it stays as a Google searcher. Here's my solution (and in this example I will be using Dictionary.com, but anything can be in its place):
- Figure out the URL pattern of the site you want to search. This can be easily done by simply conducting a couple of searches and noting the similarities. With Dictionary.com, it is quite obvious. Your search results are always in this form:
http://www.dictionary.com/browse/<query>. - Configure Camino. Like Firefox, to configure Camino, type
about:configinto your address bar. If this is your first time, it may alert you... don't worry, we're not going to kill anything. - Filter the fields. You'll see a lot of fields and values which we don't need to worry about. Filter your results by typing "keyword" into the filter box. This will narrow the list down to two items.
- Plug in the new values. In the
keyword.URLfield, you will enter in the observed search pattern. In this example, the value would be "http://www.dictionary.com/browse/". Simply double click the field and type in the new value. Now you'll actually have to enable the keyword searcher. To do this, double click thekeyword.enabledfield to set it to true. - Restart Camino. When you return - test it out! Just type a word into the address bar and hit enter, you should be taken to its result on Dictionary.com.
- Customize it. I know not everybody will be wanting to search a dictionary. You can even customize it to search Newsvine... whatever! Unfortunately, you can only have one quick search at a time. What I would like to do is have the ability to type "d <query>" for searching Dictionary.com or "n <query>" for searching Newsvine, as some other browsers do. Until then, this is the next best substitute!
Currently tested (and working) on versions:
- 1.1b
- 1.0.3
Questions and comments are welcome. Also, please let me know if you have tested it on a different version of Camino so I can report it above.




