I’m Feeling Lucky, at last.

I’ve blogged about Camino before - it’s my choice of web browser for the Mac. There has always been one little thing that annoyed me about it though - a brilliant feature which I used all the time in Firefox under Windows and Linux, which wasn’t present in Camino.

It’s the “I’m Feeling Lucky” keyword search feature built into the address bar. Say I want to go to a website - the University of Manchester’s homepage for example. Normally I’d have to type the full address (www.manchester.ac.uk) into the URL bar, or go to Google to find the page.

In Firefox, though, all I have to do is type “university of manchester” or “university manchester” or any sensible search string right into the address bar. Not the little Google search box, but into the box where you’d normally enter a URL. The browser would automatically go off to Google, search for my string, and go to the top result - the same as pressing the “I’m Feeling Lucky” button on Google’s homepage.

Once you start using this, it’s difficult to stop. I hardly ever typed in full URLs - I just entered a few keywords that I thought would take me to the site I was looking for, and hit enter. It becomes second nature after a while, and the web starts feeling like a giant brain which you can just throw questions at and get back instant answers (well, maybe that’s taking it a bit far, but still..) When I switched to Camino, that feature wasn’t there, and I had to wean myself off it.

Well, today I stumbled across a way to activate this feature in Camino! It’s there, buried in the documentation on the Camino website, but I’d just never thought to look for it before.
Here’s what you have to do. First type about:config into the address bar in Camino to bring up the hidden preferences page. You’ll need to modify two values. Find one called keyword.enabled which is set to false by default. Double-click it to flip it to true. This will enable the keyword search feature, but it will return a normal page of Google results for your search string, rather than going to the top result automatically. To fix this, find the value called keyword.URL, double-click it and change it from the default value to:

http://www.google.com/search?ie=UTF-8&oe=utf-8&btnI=I’m+Feeling+Lucky&q=

It’s as simple as that - the keyword search feature should now be enabled! It still doesn’t work exactly the same as Firefox*, but it’s close enough to make me 100% happy with my browser.

* In Firefox, if there was only one keyword (rather than multiple keywords) entered into the box - say “google” for example, Firefox would do the normal trick (which also happens in Camino, before you apply the above modifications) of prepending “www.” and appending “.com” onto the word, and going straight to www.google.com. In Camino, it will always do the keyword search once the feature has been enabled, even with just a single keyword. So if I type in the word “google“, Camino will do an “I’m Feeling Lucky” search on the word “google” and, unsurprisingly, return the Google homepage. This makes it a tiny bit slower than Firefox when you’re using single keywords, but I can deal with this. If anyone knows a way round this problem, though, please feel free to leave a comment!