I have no idea what I'm doing.

Tuesday, May 11, 2010

Moving from Firefox to Chrome - keywords and search engines

Searching from the address bar is one of my favorite features of any browser. For example, if I want to search Wikipedia for Bill Gates, I enter the following string into the address bar: w Bill Gates

Or if I'm searching for a movie: m Star Wars

These shortcuts can work with multiple search engines and multiple browsers. You can add search engines to Firefox by looking through their addon library. You can add them to Chrome manually. Here's my top four Chrome search engines, listed by keyword, search engine name, and search engine URL string:

y
YouTube
http://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=%s&search_type=&aq=1&oq=lady+

m
IMDB
http://www.imdb.com/find?q=%s

d
Merriam-Webster
http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/%s

w
Wiki
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Search?search=%s