Today I have a tool that all serious Firefox users will want: Advanced Dork. Advanced Dork is a simple but very effective idea. Google has a list of advanced search query operators, but most of us only remember two or three of them.

Advanced Dork is a Firefox add-on that adds an entry to the right click context menu that provides a submenu that lists all of the relevant advanced operators.

So clicking on one of the operators (intitle, inurl, intext, site, ext, define, maps, info, cache, product, safesearch, book, phonebook, movie, stocks, weather, related, inanchor, and link) in the submenu when text in the current page is selected, causes a new tab or a new page (depending on your Firefox settings) to be opened to Google with that search term applied.

If no text is selected then the current page’s HTML title is used with Google’s intitle operator, which searches for pages with page titles containing that text while right-clicking on a link or in the address bar allows you to execute link-related searches.

If you install this add-on you’ll start out with the reduced default set of search options which, being the power user you are, will not be adequate. You need to go into Tools | Add-ons, select the Advanced Dork entry, and edit the preferences to include all of the search options.

An interesting Advanced Dork option is to have your searches routed through scroggle.org. The reason for wanting to do this is that many people distrust Google’s management and their claim to not store personally identifiable data on searches. Scroggle is a Google proxy and thereby hides the true source of Google searches.

There are two problems with using Scroggle. The first is that the truly paranoid won’t be able to trust Scroggle any more than they trust Google! The second is that some features of Advanced Dork (searches that use define, maps, cache, product, book, phonebook, movie, stocks, and weather) won’t work properly.

If you have any browser extensions that you are particularly impressed by and that you think I should publicize let me know.

Mark Gibbs is a consultant, author, journalist, columnist and blogger.