There are a number of good third-party tools and web browser plugins that make it easy to search the Bible Gateway. But if you use the Firefox web browser, there’s a way to do Bible searches right from your browser address bar, without installing any extra software!
Doing so is easy–it involves bookmarking a Bible Gateway search URL and then assigning it a keyword. The PlasticMind blog has the details, but we’ll walk you through the basics here:
- First, you must be using the free Firefox web browser. (You might be able to do this in other browsers as well, but we’ll stick to Firefox for this example. This example also assumes you’re using Firefox in Windows, but the process is similar in OS X or Linux.)
- Bookmark the following link (right-click on it and choose ‘Bookmark This Link’):
http://www.biblegateway.com/quicksearch/?quicksearch=%s&qs_version=31
Click ‘OK’.
- Go up to the Bookmarks menu (at the top of the browser window) and select ‘Organize Bookmarks’. Find the bookmark you just made; click to select it and press the ‘Properties’ button near the top of the window.
- In the window that pops up, type niv into the Keyword field.
You can leave the other fields as they are. Click ‘OK.’
You’re done! Now if you type niv into your browser address bar followed by a verse or keyword, you can search the Bible Gateway. Try typing niv genesis 1 into your address bar, hit Enter, and see what happens:
If everything worked, you should see a Bible Gateway page with Genesis 1 displayed! From now on, anytime you need to do a quick search for a Bible passage or keyword, you can do it right from your address bar by typing niv followed by Bible passage or keywords you want to look up–no need to first visit the Bible Gateway homepage and do your search from there. You can try slightly more specific searches like niv genesis 2:1-5 or use abbreviations like niv gen 1.
You can do a lot of customization with the Bible Gateway URL you bookmarked earlier–you could bookmark a different Bible version or a different language, for instance. You could even bookmark several different Bible versions and assign a separate keyword to each (niv, kjv, esv, etc.).
The PlasticMind blog I linked to above has the URLs to bookmark for some other popular Bible versions. And if you’re feeling brave, you can customize the URL yourself by changing the ‘version’ part of the URL using this list of Bible version ID numbers.