Firefox comes out of the box with a few search engines preinstalled. You can add more by installing addons. That’s all fine and dandy, however the problem with addons is that they add extra “weight” and bits of identifying information ( finderprinting ) to the browser. Also, you should always check the permission they require. Not every addon absolutely needs access to all tabs and pages.
If you want to add custom serch engines within Firefox, you don’t even need extra addons. Firefox allows you to easily create these custom search engines, for any website that has a search box. Basically you can take a link such as https://anywebsite.com?search=%s, where Firefox replaces the %s with the search term and create a custom serch engine.
1. Browse to the desired webpage. In this example I’m going to use wiktionary.org, but it can be any page. Locate the search field and right click inside the box. Select “Add a Kayword for this Search…”
2. Set a keyword and click “save”. I will use “wd” as a keyword for wiktionary. NOTE: it can be any keyword that you want. It can be “wd” as per example, it can be “wiktionary” or just “w”. YOU set the keyword.
3. Now, when you want to search wiktionary, all you have to do is type in the omnibar wd search_term ( i.e wd human ).
3. 1 Another example, probably a more popualar one, would be YouTube. Repet step #1 and #2 and next time you want to search for a video on YouTube, no matter if you’ve just opened your browser or you’re already on a webpage just search for yt video-name.
There you go. There’s no need for addons, and it can be any website. It does not matter if it’s the Arch Linux wiki, gitlab or IMDb. As lons it has a search box, a custom search engine can be created in Firefox.