Search and Navigate Faster With Chrome Custom Search Engines
By: Stephan Schrijver
Tags: Chrome, Shortcuts, Productivity, Search, Efficiency

Photo by Markus Winkler on Unsplash

I recently found a neat feature within Google Chrome I cannot live without anymore, called Custom Search Engines. With Custom Search Engines, you can search any site using a simple keyword and the TAB-key, or navigate to paths at a particular website. Okay, any site is perhaps a bit exaggerated…

I already used the Search Engine feature a lot. For example with YouTube, and you may already be using this feature without even knowing you do.

If you type youtube in the Google Chrome address bar, you can hit the TAB-button and search for a YouTube video.

YouTube search engine within the Chrome address bar

The thing I was not aware of, is that you can add own websites to these search engines and trigger them with a specific keyword. This can come very handy and I have set it up to search for text in our Confluence wiki and navigate to specific AWS resources in the AWS console. I will be discussing one case in this article, but of course you can apply it to any other website.

Searching Wiki Content

We are using Confluence for documentation. I noticed that it is taking very long before you have the results of a search. You have to navigate to the Confluence page, wait for the page to be loaded, tap at the search bar, enter and execute the search query and then you finally see the results. Since our Confluence page is not public, I will be using wikipedia.org in this example, but you can use the same principle.

Head Over to wikipedia.org

Navigate to wikipedia.org, you will probably see somewhat the same landing page as below.

Landing page wikipedia.org

Execute a Search Query and Look at the URL

Search Engines work with replacing a particular part in the URL by the search term you enter, so you have to look at what part of the URL contains the search query after actually searching. In the example below you can see I searched for ‘software’.

Entered software as search term

The page I was redirected to after searching for ‘software’

As you can see above, the search term is actually part of the URL (en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Software), so this website is eligible to be set as Custom Search Engine in Google Chrome (please read the ‘Last Notes’).

Add a Custom Search Engine

Right click the Google Chrome Address bar, then click on ‘Edit Search Engines’ or head over to chrome://settings/searchEngines .

Right click the Google Chrome Address bar

The ‘Manage search engines’ screen in your Chrome settings

You will then enter the ‘Manage search engine’ screen in the Chrome settings. You can see some default search engines already set, and with the ‘Add’ button you can add your own search engine. Let us add wikipedia.org as our custom search engine, using the information we have gathered in the above steps. Continue by clicking the ‘Add’ button.

Provide information of the search engine in this popup

The popup above will be shown after clicking the ‘Add’ button. The three fields ‘Search engine’, ‘Keyword’ and ‘URL with…’ are all you have to fill in to get this neat feature to work.

‘Search engine’ can be any description, ‘Keyword’ is the word you have to type before hitting the TAB-key and trigger the custom search engine, in the ‘URL with…’ field you have to enter the URL of the website you want to search in and replace the search query with %s .

Let us take a look at the URL we have been redirected to after executing the ‘Software’ search query on wikipedia, which is https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Software . Software is the search query, so regarding the field description, we end up with the following URL: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%s , we have to fill this in in the ‘URL with…’ field. I have filled in ‘Wikipedia.org’ as ‘Search engine’ and ‘wiki’ as ‘keyword’. You can then add the Custom Search Engine and you will then be able to use this keyword to trigger it.

Filled in the ‘Add search engine’ popup for wikipedia.org

Go to the address bar and start typing ‘wiki’, which is the keyword we have set for our Custom Search Engine.

You will already get a suggestion to hit the TAB-key to search in Wikipedia.org. You may have noticed that this is the value set in the ‘Search engine’ field. Now hit the TAB-key and type something what you want to search.

Search for software within wikipedia.org

After typing your search query and hitting the ENTER-key, you will be redirected to the, in my case, software page at wikipedia.org.

Software page at wikipedia.org

That is quite about it! This principle can of course be used at any site eligible, which means the search query needs to be in the URL.

This feature definitely makes my life much easier :-).

Last Note

The above is just an example. You will find out that, after testing it with some search queries, the example above is not really a search query. What it does is pointing you to a page within wikipedia.org. If that page does not exist, it will not give you a nice overview of suggestions like you would expect from a search functionality. The actual URL to make a search query on wikipedia.org is https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?search=QUERYHERE , resulting in the following URL you have to fill in the ‘URL with…’ field in the ‘Add search engine’ popup: https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?search=%s .

Questions, Suggestions or Feedback

If you have any questions, suggestions or feedback regarding this article, please let me know!