How to Search Any Site Right from Your Address BarHi, my name is Annie, and I’m a searchaholic.
No, seriously. I don’t read; I search. I don’t browse; I search. I don’t scan; I search. I don’t even shop (wherever humanly possible). You guessed it … I search.
I even do all my Christmas shopping online. I just burn cinnamon candles and crank the holiday cheer from all my speakers to make me feel like I’m at the mall. It’s bad.
So to support my habit, I’m always looking for tips and tricks to shave time off of my search tasks.
One little trick I use is to create shortcuts that I can put right into my browser to trigger searches I do on sites I visit regularly. It’s so easy and time-saving you’ll want to send me chocolate-covered pretzels as a token of your appreciation. (And my birthday is in a couple weeks. How serendipitous is THAT?)
First, I’ll cover how to do this in Chrome and then Firefox. By the end you will be able to enter gs and then your keywords in your address bar to search Grooveshark in Chrome and yt to summon a YouTube search in Firefox. But this will work with any site that has site search.
Creating Search Shortcuts in Chrome
Step 1: Do a search on a site you regularly search. As I said, I’m going to use Grooveshark as an example because that’s where I go to share songs — to my friends’ great chagrin at times, I’m sure. But I also want to demonstrate this isn’t just for the heavy lifters like Google, Bing, and … yeah, that’s about it. I searched for the song Feeling Good on it because it’s my current obsession. [fans self]
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Step 2: Right-click in the address bar (officially called the Omnibar for Chrome) and select Edit search engines.
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Step 3: You’ll come to your Search Engines settings page, which you can also get to by going to Settings (via the wrench icon) > Options > Basics > Search > Manage search engines. You should see your shortcut in the list.
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Step 4: Now you can set your key that will prompt your browser to know which site to search. I’ll use gs, although you can use share, groove, jamz, whutevah. To change anything, just click and start typing. You can even set it to be your default search engine.
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Step 5: Now when you put your shortcut followed by a space in your Omnibar, you’ll see a search button with the name of your custom search engine. Then just enter your search terms and congratulate yourself for being a search honey badger.
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Creating Search Shortcuts in Firefox
Okay, I’ll skip the clever intro and just jump into the deep end of the pool since usability studies show you’re all just going to jump to Step 1 anyway. Pragmatists are ruining the Web …
Step 1: Go to the site you want to set up your search shortcut for. These are called “smart keywords” in Firefoxese. (You’re welcome.) Right-click in the search box, then choose Add a Keyword for this Search. This time I’ll use YouTube.
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Step 2: You’ll be prompted to create a new bookmark. I shave off all the extras from the title. I don’t really need all the SEO spam keywords in my bookmark. Now assign your shortcut. I’m a typophobe, so I make mine short. And I just store mine in the Bookmarks Menu since I don’t use it for anything else. (I keep my regular bookmarks on the bar.)
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Step 3: You can see where the browser has already pulled up the resulting URL for your search. (See the search_query=feeling+good query parameter?) This is before you even hit Enter/Return.
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Step 4: Voila! Your YouTube results page with the hottest music video in the history of music videos. Who cares that the video has absolutely nothing to do with the song? The videography is amazing and brimming with swagger.
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Next time I’ll talk about how you can use this with custom search engines for some high-octane search workflow. But one bag of chocolate-covered pretzels is enough. No, I insist. I don’t want to take advantage of your generosity. :)
Good collective information on the site to search right from your address bar
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Stephen
Glad it helped!
Nice post. Thanks Annie for awesome post, this post surely increases my productivity. Kudos
Thanks. I’m all about increasing productivity. ;)
You’re my GTD queen! And to what address do I send chocolate-covered pretzels. That birthday is August 3? Help me remember the date… ;-)
I was just kidding, Dana! You do not need to actually mail me chocolate-covered pretzels!
But, yes, my b’day is Aug 3. I actually didn’t realize my b’day was next week till I jokingly referred to it in my post. :)
HAPPY BIRTHDAY, ANNIE!! : )
Thanks, Cindy. :)
Just a little tip for anyone who manages to accidentally delete Google from their options when organizing the Omnibar, like I just did.
When readding it to the search engines available you need to use:
{google:baseURL}search?{google:acceptedSuggestion}{google:originalQueryForSuggestion}sourceid=chrome&ie={inputEncoding}&q=%s
as the search engine url, http://www.google.com/ doesn’t work and you can’t make it default again.