Users of the Firefox Web browser now have another reason to be happy. A flock of free plug-ins make it easy to search a growing collection of search engines direct from the Firefox search box, many of them useful to the music lover. To find these plug-ins, all you need to do is go to the Mycroft Plug-in page (http://mycroft.mozdev.org/) and click on the link for
music plug-ins.
As of this writing, there are 218 plug-ins available, written and contributed by interested users. They include plug-ins to help you search for album reviews, artist information, song lyrics, sheet music, guitar tabs, and more. Next to each one is a mark that indicates the status of the plug-in: known to be working (a checkmark), untested (a question mark), and broken (an 'X' mark). Clicking on the plug-in name will install the plug-in. It is recommended that you wait at least 15 seconds before clicking on the search bar to use the new plug-in. To uninstall a plug-in, you need to find and delete a plug-in text file in your browser installation directory.
I use plug-ins to search for album reviews and artist information on the AllMusic and Amazon sites, for available music on the eMusic service (which I subscribe to), and for radio stations on Live365 that have a particular artist or song on their playlists. I also use one to search Wikipedia, the open source encyclopedia which continues to grow in usefulness, and which now includes a substantial amount of music related information: artist biographies, album reviews, and more. Other notable plug-ins make it easy to search the Rolling Stone site, the Yahoo Launch and MSN Music services, and the Gracenote CDDB music database.
If you use these search plug-ins with any frequency, I recommend that you install the free
Conquery extension to Firefox. Conquery lets you highlight text and submit it as a query to any of Firefox's built-in search engines with a simple right click of your mouse. This way you don't have to type the query into the search box. Suppose you come across the name of an artist or album somewhere on the web and you want to learn more. You simply highlight the name and use your right mouse button to submit that name to any one of a dozen search engines. For more information on Conquery, see the article Contextual Search with Firefox by Chris Sherman on the Search Engine Watch site.
—Andy Breeding
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