Make Your Own Search Bookmarklet

For those who aren’t familiar, a bookmarklet is a hot button, written in javascript (usually), which can placed in your browser’s links bar to perfrom all sorts of tricks. I live off of using bookmarklets and don’t write about them as much as I should. They make my Web life so much easier to use.

The other day, my aggregator led me to a tool that allows users to create their own search bookmarklets. With the click of a button on the browser, you can search almost any engine. I made two. One for LS and the other for my home library.

It’s really easy. I have included screen shots for how I did it using my library catalog.

After dragging the Make Search Bookmarklet tool to your browser, run a search on the catalog (remember the keyword that you used). I ran it on the keyword search, which makes searching the entire catalog easier.

Second, click on the Make Search Bookmarklet tool and fill in the form on the page and click ‘submit’.

The tool will create another bookmarklet for you, which you should then drag into your browser’s link bar. You’re done!

Now, whenever you feel the need to search your library catalog (I do this at least 4 times per day), just click the bookmarklet you created (in my case it’s called “Search Library”) for your library and put in your search query.

Your search will then run on the catalog.

You can do this for any search page that employs the keyword in the resulting URL. Have fun creating search bookmarklets.