Mac: disable the “boop” sound played when search results are not found

Question

When you search in a page in many Mac applications (Firefox, Chrome, TextMate), a sound is played when results are not found. It's the "boop" sound that usually indicates that you are unable to perform an action (eg click a window, etc.)

I use the passive voice because I don't how this sound is played, or if each app implements this differently. In any case, it quickly gets annoying -- is there a way to disable it just for search?

Answer 1

This is the default "alert" sound used as the audible bell.

Disable alert sounds altogether

You can generally disable it by lowering the volume — Note that unchecking "Play user interface sound effects" is not the same but it only disables sound effects from Finder, etc. The alert will still go.

Also, as far as I'm concerned, you can't disable it just for some apps.

Alerts in Firefox

Firefox seems to have special settings that you can access in about:config. You can disable those, although I personally didn't hear any sounds when searching in Firefox (4.0.1), but this could be OS specific?