Hot Tip Tuesday: Chrome “Quicksearch” shortcuts

Search within any site from your Chrome browser bar

When I want to search Amazon I type “a” into the address bar, followed by a space, followed by my search term. This works thanks to Chrome’s search engine shortcuts feature and it can be used for any site that supports search.

You can assign any keyword shortcut you like. For amazon you might simply use “a”, or you might use “amazon”, or even “amazon.com”. Just follow it with a space and your search term.

Setting up quicksearches is easy. In fact, when you go into your Chrome settings you’ll find that a number of them have already been set up for you. Those preexisting quicksearches use full domain names as their keywords but I like to use short 1- or 2-letter keywords instead. You can edit the ones that exist or create entirely new ones. Here’s how:

In Chrome, go to Settings > Search Engine > Manage Search Engines (or go straight to chrome://settings/searchEngines). There, you’ll be able to add, edit, and delete all of your quicksearches.

Create a new quicksearch with the add button and give it a name and a keyword. Next, you’ll need a “Query URL” for the desired site — a URL that contains a place for your search term. You can usually find this just by running a search on the site and looking at the resulting URL (try searching for your own name). Copy and paste that URL into your new quicksearch configuration, and replace the term you searched for (your name) with %s.

That’s it.

This little known and under-supported feature has been around for ages but Google only ever makes passing references to it. It’s one of my favorite Chrome features and I have it set up for dozens of sites.

Here are some favorites:

a + space for Amazon
w + space for Wikipedia
n + space for Netflix
d + space for Dictionary.com
th + space for Thesaurus.com
cl + space for Craigslist in Los Angeles
ebay + space for eBay
gd + space for Google Drive