One of the most frequent ways of navigating the web is to search for something on Google, and navigate through the first few links to find the best match to what you're looking for. Frequently this means launching the first link, hitting back, trying the next link, etc. Because pages frequenly have redirects, even the step back to Google can take longer than necessary.

I searched for a long time for a way to get a Google search engine running within Firefox's sidebar (on Ubuntu Linux). This used to be built into IE and Mozilla back a few years ago, but seems to be missing from Firefox. There isn't even an extension to get this working.

I have finally found a solution. I noticed that bookmarks can be set to open in the side bar. This is a great first step, however Google doesn't present itself very nicely in the sidebar, it's way too bloated with all the advertising and requires lots of horizontal scrolling. Then I remembered the Google Mobile version. This is designed for a small screen, however the downside of this is it converts the pages you link to also into Mobile versions for a small screen. I found the perfect version though, at www.google.co.uk/pda - it presents links cleanly in the sidebar and opens them in their original versions in the main page.

So to summarise, create a bookmark (say on your Bookmark Toolbar) to http://www.google.co.uk/pda and hit the checkbox to open it in the sidebar. Then, you can do a Google Search from the sidebar, see all the results and open them one by one into the main window. Perfect!