Streamlining your search with Chrome Omnibox

Table of Contents

Omnibox?

Omnibox is a nickname for Chrome's address bar. As you know, you can search on Google there when you put text other than URLs.

Incidentally, did you know that you can search on whatever search engine you like there? Let me explain how.

Search Engines configuration

Open Search Engines menu:

A window like the following will show up:

How it works

There are 3 columns in the Other search engines. You may have some search engine definitions in there, because Chrome automatically identifies and registers search engines there. You can simply ignore them. Each column signifies Name, Keyword and Search String respectively.

Let's take a look at how each element cooperates:

Find the Search String

To find Search Strings for your favorite search engines, you need to do simple experiments.

  1. Enter search words into the search engine.
  2. Recognize the words you just entered from the result URL.
  3. Replace them with %s

Here is an example: (featuring SymbolHound)

http://symbolhound.com/ (default)

http://symbolhound.com/?q=yeongho (searched 'yeongho')

http://symbolhound.com/?q=%s (Search String)

My Search Engines configuration

I listed my Search Engines configuration for those who feel frustrated with Search Strings:

bookmarks     b   chrome://bookmarks/#q=%s
history       h   chrome://history/?#q=%s
github        gh  https://github.com/search?q=%s
google        g   http://www.google.com/search?q=%s
google image  i   http://www.google.com/search?tbm=isch&q=%s
naver         n   https://search.naver.com/search.naver?query=%s
naver endic   e   http://endic.naver.com/search.nhn?query=%s
naver krdic   k   http://krdic.naver.com/search.nhn?query=%s
symbolhound   s   http://symbolhound.com/?q=%s
thesaurus     t   http://www.thesaurus.com/browse/%s
youtube       y   https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=%s

Bookmark Search Chrome Extension

Bookmark Search is an extension that uses Omnibox. Like other custom search engines, you can trigger it with the Keyword, bm.

The best thing about it is auto-completion. You can open your bookmarks in a single step without knowing the exact bookmark that you desire for.

I put pyth in there, and it shows the list of my bookmarks related to Python. I can open reference documents in just a single step with this extension.

Summary

It may seem that this work is just to save a single step.

However, how many times do you search in a day? One step save for every single search would be a huge save. In addition to that, ease of search makes you look things up more, which could leads you to working more effectively.

Happy search!