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:
2. Bing
Keyword: b
URL: http://www.bing.com/search?setmkt=ru-RU&q=%s
3. Flickr – searches the biggest pictures database for what you need
Keyword: f
URL: http://www.flickr.com/search/?q=test&ss=0&ct=0&mt=all&w=all&adv=1
OR URL: http://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: http://isohunt.com/torrents/%s
5. Evernote – searches through all my notes instantly
Keyword: e
URL: http://www.evernote.com/Home.action?login=true#v=t&x=%s+&z=d
6. Facebook
Keyword: fa
URL: http://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: http://docs.google.com/#search/%s
9. Google Reader – to find anything I ever read there
Keyword: gr
URL: http://www.google.com/reader/view/#search/%s
10. Youtube
Keyword: y
URL: http://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=%s&page={startPage?}&utm_source=opensearch
11. LinkedIn
Keyword: l
URL: http://www.linkedin.com/commonSearch?type=people&keywords=%s&search=Search
12. Delicious – quick tag look-up in my bookmarks
Keyword: d
URL: http://del.icio.us/YOURUSERNAMEHERE/%s
12. Academic Earth – find great free lectures
Keyword: a
URL: http://www.academicearth.org/lectures/search/%s
13. Wikipedia
Keyword: w
URL: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Search/%s
14. Whois – check a domain name
Keyword: wh
URL: http://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!
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