Better search results with Visual-Search

Web search can be tough sometimes. If you are looking for a word that has several meanings you may get too much irrelevant pages in your search results so you need to refine the search either adding more terms or filtering some out.

Visual-Search is a clever Firefox extension developed by Robert Bunn, that helps you do exactly this in a (you guessed) visual way.

It works in a very intuitive way. Once you get the search results on one of the many supported search engines, you just need to select the words you want to add or exclude from the results and Visual-Search pops up a two buttons mini-toolbar. Press the red minus button to filter out the selected words or the green plus button to filter in.

It’s not magic though. I said clever. What it does is rerun the search adding the selection with the necessary operator to filter it in or out accordingly.

I found a couple of bugs, however. When I highlighted more than one word, say living beings and press the minus button, it added -living beings to the search terms which excluded results with living but made beings a required word which wasn’t what I wanted. Hopefully a coming version will add the needed quotes to make the words a single keyword.

Another one prevents the mini toolbar to appear in a search results page if I change to another tab and get back. I had to reload the results page to get the buttons back.

The list of supported search engines is comprehensive and includes Google, Windows Live, Yahoo!, Ask, Altavista, Clusty, Rollyo, Technorati and many others. However Visual-Search developers don’t stop there and offer to add support for a specific search engine.

Get Visual-Search at Mozilla Add-ons. You can also watch a video introduction to Visual-Search.