Magic shortcuts: 13 best chrome custom searches that will save you lots of time

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As you may already know, Google Chrome has an amazing feature that let’s you edit search engines. And search engine means literally any website. What’s the practical application?

Well, if you type something like “great blog” and press enter, by default you’ll be redirected to Google. But you can set up your Chrome to use, let’s say, Yahoo when you type “y great blog” or Bing when you type “b great blog”. Sounds like a great life-hack and a time-saver, doesn’t it? So, instead of going to the other website you just add one letter before the query itself and Chrome uses the other search engine to find what you need.

First, you’ll need to know how to add a new search engine, I won’t go into details as there are a lot of tutorials on web at the moment.

I’m sure you can come up with lost of ideas on how to use this feature yourself, but let me sparkle your imagination a little with my own list of searches. Here is what I use and consider to be the most useful:

1. Google. Well, it’s kind of obvious :)2. Bing

Keyword: b
URL: https://www.bing.com/search?setmkt=ru-RU&q=%s

3. Flickr – searches the biggest pictures database for what you need

Keyword: f
URL: https://www.flickr.com/search/?q=test&ss=0&ct=0&mt=all&w=all&adv=1
OR URL: https://www.flickr.com/search/?q=%s&l=cc&ct=0&mt=all&adv=1
for Creative Commons licensed stuff only

4. Isohunt – movies, audiobooks, software or whatever you need

Keyword: i
URL: https://isohunt.com/torrents/%s

5. Evernote – searches through all my notes instantly

Keyword: e
URL: https://www.evernote.com/Home.action?login=true#v=t&x=%s+&z=d

6. Facebook

Keyword: fa
URL: https://www.facebook.com/search/?src=os&q=%s

7. Gmail

Keyword: gm
URL: https://mail.google.com/mail/#search/%s

8. Google Docs

Keyword: gd
URL: https://docs.google.com/#search/%s

9. Google Reader – to find anything I ever read there

Keyword: gr
URL: https://www.google.com/reader/view/#search/%s

10. Youtube

Keyword: y
URL: https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=%s&page={startPage?}&utm_source=opensearch

11. LinkedIn

Keyword: l
URL: https://www.linkedin.com/commonSearch?type=people&keywords=%s&search=Search

12. Delicious – quick tag look-up in my bookmarks

Keyword: d
URL: https://del.icio.us/YOURUSERNAMEHERE/%s

12. Academic Earth – find great free lectures

Keyword: a
URL: https://www.academicearth.org/lectures/search/%s

13. Wikipedia

Keyword: w
URL: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Search/%s

14. Whois – check a domain name

Keyword: wh
URL: https://www.domaintools.com/go/?service=whois&q=%s

Hope, you are going to like it! If you have any great ideas that could make this list longer, shout! 🙂

2 Comments

  2. Nice ideas! I like the idea of having a direct search to my Evernote. Since I’m a developer, I also added StackOverflow, Maven and GrepCode to my search engines xD yay!

    Reply

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