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Chrome Search Engines

If you use Google Chrome for your web browser, then Chrome search engines can be helpful to get you to specific pages within sites that you use frequently. The way it works is you add a keyword for a site as a search engine; then you can just type that keyword into the omnibox (URL bar) followed by a space and type in the term that you are looking for.

Chrome automatically adds several of these search engines by default. For example, if you type in ‘google.com’ and then a space, then you will see that you are now searching Google.

That is a nice feature, but also requires a bit more typing than I’d like at times. If you’d like a shorter keyword to trigger the search with less keystrokes, you can go into the settings and set the keyword (in this case the keyword was google.com) to something shorter. For example, you could set the Google keyword to ‘g’. Since Chrome automatically searches Google if you type anything into the omnibox, that search engine is not particularly useful; however, setting up other search engines that search other sites that you frequent can be used to save large amounts of time. I will use some examples from sites that I use frequently to show you how powerful Chrome search engines can be. Just follow these steps:

  • Open Google Chrome
  • Click on ‘Chrome’ in the menu bar, then ‘Preferences’
  • Click on ‘Manage search engines…’ under the Search section
  • Scroll all the way to the bottom to add custom search engines
  • Add any search engines that you want.
    • The first field can be any name to identify it.
    • The Keyword field is what you will type into the omnibox for your search (shorter is typically better as long as it makes sense to you).
    • The URL field is the URL that your search will be performed on. Add “%s” in the section that you want your query to be inserted.
  • Here are some example search engines for the Drupal 7 and 8 APIs as well as the Drupal Answers website:

Example search engines

Drupal.org (go directly to a module/theme)

Drupal 7 (search the Drupal 7 API)

Drupal 8 (search the Drupal 8 API)

Drupal Answers (search the Drupal Answers website)

Once you have added your search engines, click ‘Done’ and you are ready to search. Click in the omnibox and type in your keyword followed by a space. You’ll see it show you that you are now searching that site. Now, just type in your search term and hit enter.

Happy searching!