Firefox Extensions for Getting the Most Out of Google

If you’re a Firefox user and you spend any significant time using Google, a couple of free, easy-to-install Firefox extensions can help you get much more out of your search sessions. Google Preview and Googlepedia are extensions that I use in conjunction with each other to take me to what I’m searching for faster, and to give me more information about search results that I haven’t yet looked at.

You can download and install these two Firefox extensions in a couple minutes. You’ll be prompted to restart Firefox to make the tools active, and then they are automatically incorporated into your Google searches. Google Preview inserts thumbnail preview images to the left of your lists of search results. In addition to the text-based search results you’re used to scanning, you get images you can also scan, like this:

Using Google Preview, you can right-click on any thumbnail image and select “Request update of Google Preview image” to make sure you’re looking at the most recently updated image. Frequently, being able to see thumbnails along with results can take you quickly to what you want.

In addition to Google Preview, I like Googlepedia for giving me extra information on the right side of my Google pages, and giving me the maximum amount of information to scan before I open up individual search results. This extension aligns relevant Wikipedia articles—and accompanying photos–with your search results. This is useful not only because the Wikipedia information automatically tells you more about the topic you’re searching on, but because you can click on links within the Wikipedia articles to automatically trigger Google searches related to those links. When researching a topic, the Wikipedia articles and their embedded links will often get you what you want faster than the Google search results do.

Googlepedia comes with a Hide button if you don’t want the Wikipedia articles displayed when you do searches, and you can use an Expand button that is present atop the articles to have them occupy the full width of the page when you want to read them. Oh, and one more bonus to Googlepedia is that it removes AdWords listings. Who can’t do with a little less advertising during a research session?

Do you have any tips on how to get more out of Google?

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