Google For Dummies

Fingering Through Results: Keyboard Shortcuts

Unlike Voice Search (see the preceding section), Keyboard Shortcuts might replace the normal Google interface in your habitual searching. The goal of this Labs experiment is to get your hand off the mouse when viewing search results and put full browsing control in the keyboard. In this interface you can scroll up and down the search results list — even launching target sites — using keypresses.

Start your Keyboard Shortcuts search here:

labs.google.com/keys/

Type your keywords, press Enter, and get to the results page (see Figure 8-12). Keyboard Shortcuts uses a special cursor for indicating your progress through search results: a little cluster of three colored balls. When the search results page first displays, that cursor is positioned next to the first result. Use the K and I keys to move the cursor down and up the results list. This works best when your hands are positioned like a touch-typists, with the middle finger of your right hand resting on the K key, and the middle finger of your left hand resting on the D key.

Figure 8-12: Keyboard Shortcuts in action.

Here are some other shortcut functions:

• Press Enter to open a search results link.

• Press C to view the cached (stored) page of the indicated result.

• Press S to see the Similar Pages list.

• Use the L and J keys to toggle between the AdWords advertisements on the left side of the page (if any are there for your search results) and the main results list.

• Press N to see the next page of search results, and press P to see the previous page.

• Press the number keys 1 through 9 to jump to search results down or up the page. (Keyboard Shortcuts ignores the Preferences setting requesting more than 10 results per page.) Beware of using the number keys unless you want to surf directly to the site represented by that numbered result. Google assumes that you want to see the site, not the search result listing, and shoots your browser right to it.

• Press A to highlight the keyword box for typing new keywords.

• Press the question-mark key (it’s not necessary to use the Shift key, as you would when typing a question mark) to drop down a cue sheet to the keyboard shortcuts (see Figure 8-12). Press it again to make the list disappear.

Keyboard Shortcuts takes a little practice to master — and is worth it.