I do a lot of searching on the internet, and Swift Selection Search makes my searches easier and more enjoyable. When I select text on a webpage, SSS opens a popup nearby that gives me a choice of —
- Copying the string,
- Using the selected string as a link to open a webpage.
- Searching for the selected string, either via a search engine (think Google, Bing, etc.) or via a website’s own search function (think Ebay, Amazon, NYTimes, etc.).
Swift Selection Search’s summary description simply says “Swiftly access your search engines in a popup panel when you select text in a webpage. Context menu also included!”, but that doesn’t really give a clue as to how good it is. You’ll get a better idea of SSS’s capabilities by reading the fuller description farther down the page https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/swift-selection-search/?src=search.
SSS is customizable. You can add or remove items and rearrange the order of items. I found adding items a bit tricky until I figured out that I needed to include the string [={searchTerms}] (without the square brackets). You can get clues for formatting your entries by closely examining the items already included in the list presented when you click “Options” in SSS’s panel in FF’s Addon Manager tab, and by looking at the format of results when you directly manually do the search you want to add into SSS. It is a learning experience, but the result is worth the effort. I’ve found that 13 items is about as many as I want to include in my SSS popup window.