How to search Redfin directly from IE and Firefox

I recently heard that some loyal Redfin customers were using Google to do address searches. That’s a shame, since Redfin does a pretty decent job of searching for addresses, MLS IDs, cities, etc. I wanted to see if I could help those power users get to Redfin search results with fewer clicks.

Naturally, I wanted to see if I could make a Redfin search available. It was surprisingly easy- I didn’t have to change any Redfin code. I just wrote an XML file, hosted it on a Web server, and put a link into an HTML page (this page, in fact!)

If you’re using Firefox or Internet Explorer 7, you should be able to enable Redfin search by choosing the relevant option in the search dropdown while viewing this page. Here’s a screenshot of Firefox:

Here’s how it looks in IE7:

Once you’ve added Redfin, you can do address searches on Redfin using the search control:

Another way to do searches in Redfin is to use a keyword bookmark. In Firefox, make a new bookmark, and edit it to look like this:

The important parts are the location and the keyword. The location got cut off in my screenshot, but it should be http://www.redfin.com/stingray/do/listings-search#search_location=%s

(the only tricky part is the “%s” part, which will get replaced with whatever you search for.)

To use it, you type the keyword and the search terms into your location bar, like this:

or this (for an MLS):