Prefetch Yahoo! Search Results
Automatically prefetch and cache the first search result on Yahoo! Web Search.
If you know how to use them properly, search engines are pretty darn good at finding exactly the page you’re looking for. Google is so confident in its algorithm that it includes a hidden attribute in the search results page that tells Firefox to prefetch the first search result and cache it. You’re probably going to click on the first result anyway, and when you do, it will load almost instantaneously because your browser has already been there.
Yahoo! Web Search is pretty good too, but it doesn’t yet have this particular feature. So let’s add it.
Tip
This hack relies on the Greasemonkey extension and thus works only in Firefox. If you’re interested in doing much more with Greasemonkey, see Mark Pilgrim’s forthcoming Greasemonkey Hacks, from which this hack is excerpted.
To begin, you’ll need to install the Greasemonkey plug-in for Firefox. If you don’t already have it, browse to http://greasemonkey.mozdev.org and click the Install Greasemonkey link. Follow the Software Installation prompts and then restart your browser. You’ll know the plug-in is working if you see a small monkey icon in the lower-right corner of Firefox. Once installed, you can move on to analyzing Yahoo! and building the Greasemonkey script.
There are two important things about Yahoo! Search results that you can discover by viewing source on the search results page. First, the links of the search results ...
Become an O’Reilly member and get unlimited access to this title plus top books and audiobooks from O’Reilly and nearly 200 top publishers, thousands of courses curated by job role, 150+ live events each month,
and much more.
Read now
Unlock full access