The browser secret everyone must know

No doubt web searches have become much simpler since modern-day browsers started to integrate these in their address bars (location bars, Omnibox, Awesome bars or whatever else they call them). All one needs to do is type in the search term in the address bar and effect a search by pressing enter. The default search in most cases is Google, though this could differ depending on your browser and where it is sourced from. (Of course, you can always change the default search engines from your browser’s search settings.)

More exciting than direct searching, however, is the ability to do keyword searches. For instance, say, your default search engine is DuckDuckGo, but now and again you also like to look up stuff on Wikipedia or IMDB, find a video on YouTube, or check the price of something on Flipkart, Amazon or Snapdeal. Wouldn’t it be amazing if you could do a conditional direct search? That is to say, search a particular favourite site that directly from the address bar, without having to navigate to that site first.

The good news is, this is easily done — with keyword searches. Browsers like Google Chrome, Mozilla Firefox and Opera already have built-in functionality for this, while you can use an extension for Safari. Thus, if your Flipkart shortcut is ‘fl’, typing in ‘fl colouring book’ would search Flipkart for ‘colouring book’. Read on for how to set up keyword searches.

In Chrome, first go to the website you want to create a keyword for and use the search box to search for something. The search term can be anything; we just need the URL for the next step. Select and copy the URL of the search results page. Then, go to settings, find the search option and click on the ‘manage search engines…’ button. In the box that pops up, enter the name the search and your chosen keyword. Then enter the URL you just copied, replacing your search term with ‘%s’. For instance, if your copied URL is https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SearchTerm, it will become https://en.wiki­pedia.org/wiki/%s. Click on ‘done’ and you’re ready to use your keyword search.

In Firefox and Opera, on any site, right-click on the search field and choose ‘add a keyword for this search’ or ‘create search engine’. Enter your preferred keyword shortcut and it’s done. Opera has a list of built-in search engines with pre-assigned keywords, which you can edit. You can add new search extensions as well.

Firefox also built-in searches for which you can assign keywords. Go to the search section in the settings to find them. To add more searches, click the ‘add more search engines…’ link at the bottom of the page. This will take you to the Mozilla add-ons site for Firefox from where you can add one-click search engines to your browser. (An interesting aside: you can even assign keywords to your bookmarks in Firefox.)

Safari, unfortunately, does not do keyword searches natively, but you can use a browser extension called Safari keyword search. This extension comes with a set of pre-assigned search shortcuts — Google, Google Maps, Wikipedia, IMDB, YouTube, DuckDuckGo — but you can edit the list and add your own. The process is similar to how you’d do it in Chrome, only, instead of adding ‘%s’ in place of the search term, you add ‘@@@’.

There doesn’t seem to be a way to do keyword searches in Edge yet, though it was possible in some Internet Explorer versions by toying with the Windows registry. That, however, is not for the faint of heart and we dare not recommend it.

Source | Financial Chronicle | 29 March 2016

Regards

Pralhad Jadhav

Senior Librarian

Khaitan & Co

Upcoming Event | National Conference on Future Librarianship: Innovation for Excellence (NCFL 2016) during April 22-23, 2016.

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