After reading Joe Hall’s tips on hacking bookmarks, I decided to set one up for Manta.com, so I can quickly search for any of the 17 million US companies in its database.

I created a bookmark (I did it in Firefox 3, my default browser), then edited the details so they looked this:

Make sure you add the %s after the search parameter in the Location field. The description was automagically pulled from the site, you don’t actually need that info for this to work.

For my keyword I choose simply “manta”.

Now all I need to do to manta a company is to click in the address bar in my Firefox window and type “manta XYZ” where XYZ is the name of the company I’m looking for.

e.g. “manta google”

Also note that with our recently improved internal search functionality, you can also add other words into your search criteria, e.g. “manta google mountain view, ca”

Note: This only works in Firefox. If you want to add Manta.com as a search engine, let me know and I can hack something together.

So for some reason, against my usual software policy, I decided to download and install the new Google Toolbar 3 beta. I had multiple Firefox 2.x windows open at the time and thought I’d take advantage of the session restore feature. It downloaded ok, installed and prompted me to restart firefox. When it restarted, it brought up a preferences screen, but Firefox was also trying to restore the other sessions and had several windows open. Unfortunately it all went horribly wrong and I had to terminate the process and launch firefox again. Not a huge issue and something I thought I may be able to get away with.

One nice feature I’ve been wanting is to be able to access my bookmarks from any PC. Since I do some seo/sem research at home as well as work, I’m constantly adding nice little bookmarks and I haven’t yet used anything to keep them in sync. I have high hopes for this online bookmarks feature.
I uploaded all my bookmarks and just as I suspected it decided to use my folder names as the labels. Sounds great, until you realize that you used the Bookmarks Toolbar Folder. So now I have labels like this:

Bookmarks Toolbar Folder:SEO
Bookmarks Toolbar Folder:SEO:PPC
Bookmarks Toolbar Folder:SEO:Research
etc

Ok, I could have edited the labels at the import process, but it doesn’t make much difference, I still have to go and edit all those redundant instances of Bookmarks Toolbar Folder. So if you’re about to try this feature, do yourself a favor and organize your bookmarks before you import them into Personalized Search.

I’ll see what happens when I get to work tomorrow morning and import bookmarks from that PC. I wonder if it’ll warn me about duplicates…