When searching through long lists of items on the web, there seem to be two ways to go. Some people seem to prefer what I'll refer to as the "short list" style while others prefer the "long list". The short list, as you may have guessed is one where the number of items listed fills up only a screenful or two of items. They then hit the "next", "more", or page number button to see more items. The long list style people prefer getting many screenfuls on a single page. For lists that are only many screenfuls long, they probably prefer all of the data on one page. I'm assuming that nobody actually prefers to see all 2,872,124 Google hits on one page but perhaps there are.

Most sites give you some adjustment when searching between how many results you see on one page. Unfortunately, for me, a seriously long list guy, most sites don't provide enough for my tastes. For example, let's say you wanted to read all about me (for the sake of my ego, let's pretend that would interest somebody besides my mother), you would go to Google and enter the search term of: "Neil Smithline" -"dr." -"m.d." (I have a 2nd cousin, once removed with the same name - he's a doctor so eliminating pages with "Dr." and "M.D." pretty much eliminates false positives).

At this moment Google is giving me 838 hits (190 without duplicates). That means you'll have to hit the "next" button to read them all as Google, while allowing the number of hits per page to be set in the search preferences page, it only allows 100 hits per page - not nearly enough of me for my tastes.

So, in comes the repagination add-on for Firefox. The way it works is simple, do a search, on Google or practically any other site that ends with a "Next" or "Page 2" link, click on the link and select "Repagination-->All" and the search page you are looking at grows (you can watch the scrollbar shrink as the page grows - cool to watch). All of the pages in the search get concatenated to the first page. Then you can just scroll through the single page and, continuing with our example, select all of the links to Web pages talking about me. Better yet, if you are looking for a specific type of link, you can search through all of the hits without having to search and re-search with different keywords in Google.

And, while I'm on the topic of search enhancements, Linky allows you select links then open them in separate tab. This way, you can select all 190 pages about me and open them in 190 tabs. Linky even seems to have some clever options and algorithms to remove duplicates, only open links that are images, etc...

Oh, in case it isn't clear by now, both of these add-ons work for sites other than using Google and tasks other than researching me (although what could be more important than that ). In fact, they work quite well on most sites.