4.1.2 An alternative (and fast) way to search the web

If you're a "Web Power User" (and since you're reading this, you probably are), you need a quick and efficient way to perform searches. The Quick Searching feature is one.

What does it do? It lets you launch web searches by simply going to a special URL such as gg:emacs. The advantages of this mode of operation are:

• It's fast. You just have to type a URL to choose the engine and the search word(s), in one go.

• It's convenient. With this feature, you can easily open a new emacs-w3m tab or window, and launch a search in it, using for example, the G key to open a URL in a new window, and going to a Quicksearch URL. You can also bookmark searches just by bookmarking the special Quicksearch URL.

• It works with the grouping feature. You can launch two searches at the same time, with a URL like group:gg:emacs&ya:w3m. This would for instance launch a search for "emacs" on Google and for "w3m" on Yahoo!. See section 4.2 Visiting several web pages in one URL.

Using it is very simple: suppose you want to search for the word "gnu" on Google. Hit g to go to a new URL, and type "gg:gnu". The first part of this expression, "gg" indicates that we want to use the Google search engine. The second term is the word we will be searching for. The prefix and the search term must be separated by a colon. Hit RET, and you will see the results of your search. Please note that you can input several words by separating them with spaces (to type a space in the minibuffer, hit C-q first, e.g. C-q SPC).

The default configuration of emacs-w3m includes several prefixes you can use, they are defined in the w3m-uri-replace-alist variable. There's for example "gg" for Google, "ggg" for Google Groups, "ya" for Yahoo!, "al" for Altavista, to name a few. You can also add prefixes for the search engines you define, See section 4.1.3 Using your favorite engines.

Instead of prefixes, you can also use full engine names in Quicksearch URLs, such as "google" or "yahoo". These names are defined in the w3m-search-engine-alist variable.