Firefox Search Plug-ins

[brian.mark]

Anyone created a Firefox Search Plug-in? I'm wondering if anyone has experience with how much those get used. I know all the big sites (Amazon, Buy, Shopping Engines, NewEgg, eBay, etc.) all have them, but do they get used?

We created one today and have a link showing up with browser detection on our site to install it. We even did a correct implementation of sidebar support. Anyone know how to best utilize the fact that we created that to our advantage? This seems like an interesting new form of marketing, so if I have to be the test pilot I don't mind, but if someone has experience I'd love to hear about it.

Brian.

[chadhaajay]

Hello Brian,

What is the link to your Firefox extension? By the way, we also develop and program customized mozilla firefox toolbar extensions for our clients.

Please feel free to visit us at http://www.chadhaajay.net for more details.

[brian.mark]

It's listed here. Just look for ToolBarn. A co-worker developed much of it - I just made the tweaks we needed on our website for the sidebar to fully function (adding comments, making a few link / content changes, etc.)

How has that worked for marketing your customer's sites? Has it added stickiness?

Brian.

[Orion]

We also created a plugin for a search engine we developed. Here's the plugin. I'd love to know if there was a way to track their download and useage. I wonder if they show up differently in the referrers section of the site stats?

I haven't even had the chance to look into the sidebar search as yet...

Let me know if you find out anything you can do.

[brian.mark]

We added a parameter when somone uses the tool. That seemed an easy way to track the usage. Should be an interesting experiment.

Surely someone has tracked this already... I can't be the first.

Brian.

[Orion]

Did you add the parameter in the search URL?

I was wondering if there was also a way to track the installs. That would be nice too.

[brian.mark]

Well, I don't really know of a way to track installs (especially if someone goes to the plugins site directly). If you've got a link to it from your site that installs it, I suppose you could use a redirection script that tracks how many people clicked on "Install". Not quite the same, but it'd get you a step closer.

Yes, we added the parameter in the search URL.

blah.com/searchscript?source=plugin&searchstring=_____

Haven't seen much yet (other than from our IP - our employees love it.)

Brian.

[Orion]

Maybe that's something we should propose to the mozilla team there. If we had to register and login to submit a plugin then they could track the installs for us there. I think it would be something worthwhile.

It's a great little feature to offer clients their own plugins for firefox but how much better it would be to be able to track it.

On the searches from it sounds like you have the right idea on how to track it's use. I haven't heard of anyone else doing that, but I'm going to recommend it to our programmer and I'll set it up in the Search URL.

I build a one of the free toolbars (http://www.effectivebrand.com/ for our hosting clients to use, and added our http://search.orionsweb.net as a search option in it. It tracks downloads but not useage (we can use your suggestion for useage). (great way to notify clients of server status and updates etc.

[brian.mark]

I've already spotted a user from Amazon.com that installed it (they search our site pretty much all day long), plus I see 3 other people not from our company using it. Not bad for just making it available yesterday. It'll be interesting to see how much they keep using it.

Very weird seeing the Amazon.com user with it. They normally use IE with the Alexa Toolbar (making our Alexa stats climb). Sort of makes it seem like Alexa is showing the popularity of websites among Amazon employees. :-)

Brian.

[Evic]

I have quite a few Search plug-ins installed, and use them all the time.

My current search plugins are:
- Google
- Yahoo
- MSN
- Amazon
- Creative Commons
- Dictionary.com
- eBay
- PHP Functions List
- TorrentSpy
- Whois.net

I personally find them invaluable and would much rather use them than go to the site and search. It saves me from loading one page.