The growth of Twitter has far exceeded the expectations of many people, both in terms of scale and speed. The sheer number of users logging into the service, be it via the web site or using one of the many Twitter clients that are available, is staggering. For some people this represents an unprecedented level of connectedness, but for everyone involved it means that there is a huge volume of information to work with.

There is no denying that the Twitter web site makes it fairly easy to perform search. Whether you are looking for a particular person, or you want to find out more about something that other users are talking about, conducting searches for Twitter users and their tweets is far from taxing. If you are using a Twitter client, things are likely to be even easier, and the option of creating saved searches can be a real time saver.

But when you are looking for Twitter based information for the first time, you will generally need to break away from whatever web site you are looking at in order to visit Twitter.com or to switch to your Twitter client. This is an unnecessarily lengthy process, and one that can be simplified and shortened using the Twitter Address Bar Search addon for Firefox.

Available for Mac, Windows, Linux and Android, the addon makes it possible to search for Twitter users from the address bar by starting your searches with @, or to search hash tags by starting with #. The Twitter web site is also added as a search engine to the list that appears in the search bar. In addition to this, installing the addon will also create an app tab for Twitter whose dynamic icon will light up whenever new tweets are received – saving you from having to manually check.

To find out more and to download a free copy of the addon, pay a visit to the Twitter Address Bar Search review page.