Is there a way to display search history (a list of recent searches) with the Firefox search box? Google Toolbar has a dropdown arrow - don't see any such option.
I can't (on a quick Google search) find any easy way; there may well be a Firefox extension to do this. Anyhow this is how I did it just now:
Note: before I did the below I enabled the Firefox search box, cleared the search history, and then successively searched for "bacon", "eggs", "ham" and "cheese". Maybe I'm getting hungry?
1. The search history (along with, I guess, a lot of other stuff) is stored in an Sqlite database in your Mozilla Profile folder. The database file is called
formhistory.sqlite.
2. You need to query this database with the following sql query
SELECT value FROM moz_formhistory WHERE fieldname='searchbar-history';3. You can do this with a command line program called sqlite3.exe. This program is quite common; it is installed with quite a lot of apps so you may have it already. If not, you can get it from here in a 237 kB zip archive:
http://www.sqlite.org/sqlite-shell-win32-x86-3070600.zipExtract sqlite3.exe and place it either in your Mozilla profile folder or else somewhere on your PATH.
4. You can view the search history manually like this
at the command prompt type sqlite3.exe followed by the database name. This starts sqlite3 and loads the database.
sqlite3 formhistory.sqliteNow you see the sqlite welcome message and prompt and you type the query and hit Enter and you see your search history listing and you type .exit to get back to the Windows command prompt.
C:\Users\Mike\Application Data\Mozilla\Firefox\Profiles\k65vu6mr.default>sqlite3 formhistory.sqlite
SQLite version 3.6.22
Enter ".help" for instructions
Enter SQL statements terminated with a ";"
sqlite> SELECT value from moz_formhistory WHERE fieldname='searchbar-history';
bacon
eggs
ham
cheese
sqlite> .exit
C:\Users\Mike\Application Data\Mozilla\Firefox\Profiles\k65vu6mr.default>
5. If this seems tedious then here is a batch file to put in the Profile folder which will do it for you and open the search history in Notepad. You could make a shortcut to this on your desktop, or Quick Launch or wherever, or maybe there is some kind of Mozilla extension to let you run it from inside Firefox.
@echo off
echo SELECT value FROM moz_formhistory WHERE fieldname='searchbar-history';>searchbarhistory.sql
sqlite3.exe formhistory.sqlite < searchbarhistory.sql > searchbarhistory.txt
start "" "notepad" "searchbarhistory.txt"
I should EMPHASISE that what I know about sql I have learned in the last half hour, and it is quite possible that others who are used to working with this kind of stuff can advise about some better method. There may be some kind of Firefox addon that can do all this. And probably other things you might want to do with the recent search list besides viewing it in Notepad, but at least you now know one way to get at it.
