As an editor, it is my job to find new authors and new tech topics and knowing where to look is key. As such, I am always adding to my list of places to search hoping to find the next big thing, or someone with a passion for a topic I am interested in publishing on. Of course, my searches are almost entirely web-based these days, and I continue to look to the next place new ideas and authors may be found.

I use Firefox as my browser of choice. It is literally a Swiss Army Knife for web workers, and mine is heavily customized with a variety of add-ons and Greasemonkey scripts. Today, I was looking for a search plugin for Twitter and quickly discovered none was available. I did find the solution to my problem, but it would involve me creating my own plugin.

Here are the simple steps for building your own Firefox Search Plugin without needing to understanding OpenSearch or MozSearch formats.

1. Grab the Add to Search Bar Plugin for Firefox. The plugin is v 1.5.1 at the time of this post and supports Firefox 2.0 – 3.0a2. This great little add-on allows the user to right click into any website’s search field and turn it into a Firefox Search plugin. It’s quick. It’s easy. It works. If the website you want to search already has a search feature, you are done - start searching.
2. In the case of Twitter, there is currently no search feature, so I needed to create my own. Google to the rescue! I created a twitter search using Google’s Custom Search.
3. Once the twitter search was created, I just right clicked in the Google Custom Search search field, and added it as a Firefox search plugin.
4. The default icon for Google Custom Search is the same one Firefox uses for regular Google searches. To avoid confusing myself, I nabbed twitter’s favicon and saved a copy to my hard drive and selected that as my new search icon.

Google Custom Search allows you to add multiple sites to your custom search, so using the steps above, one could create a quick Firefox search plugin to search several social networks at once. I find this useful to weed out the results from the rest of the Interwebs that I would normally need to sift through in a regular Google search.

UPDATE: Just discovered Dave Troy’s Twittersearch  which uses the Twitter API to do searches of the public timeline rss feed.  I added it as well, but it only returns results that are currently in the feed.  Thats good for current twits but the Google custom search method gets the past twits as well.

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