You could use bookmark keywords in Firefox, which provide a similar function:

1. Create a bookmark for some-service.example.com/search?q=foo

2. Open the properties for the bookmark. Replace "foo" with "%s" (the universal string for bookmark keyword variables). In the keyword field, type some letter or string you'll remember; I'll use "q". Close the properties dialog.

3. In the URL field, type "q my-search-terms".

(At least that worked in older versions of FF.) It requires more setup, but works permanently.

It appears that this process has been streamlined a bit. If you right-click in a search field on any site, the context menu has an option to "Add a keyword for this search." The new bookmark will then be created with the "%s" string in the appropriate position in the URL to make this work.

I've set it up for a number of sites since converting over to Firefox yesterday and have yet to find a site that this method doesn't work for.

Thanks

The keyword trick given by others is nice. If like me you are lazy, use the autocomplete feature.

First manually type the URL with the search terms and validate. Then for your second search type some unique part of the base URL and it appears because it is in your history, press down and modify the URL for your new search.

When you have done this several times, it seems firefox understands what you are trying to do and autocompletes the URL with the common parts.

Works Weil with wiktionary, wikipedia and WordReference for instance. Special mention to WordReference with its friendly URL scheme.

Works on firefox mobile too.

I canot remember how to validate autocompletion, my fingers do it themeselves. It must be something like Right or CTRL+Right. On mobile, it is a touch.

Tried this a few times, didn't seem to trigger. Thanks for the suggestion though. I have enough specific searches that switching to the keyword trick works well enough for me.

I wonder why it works for me and not for you. I guess I'll have to guess what in my usage pattern allows that :-)

Maybe I accessed the base URL without the query parameters.

Probably an alternative: you can configure a keyword to a stored search engine. Then you can search like `a lean startup`, where `a` is a keyword followed by a blank for amazon.com.

I found this to be very fast. It's also handy for translations, etc..

Thanks. This was exactly what I was looking for.