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Chome: Adding Custom Search Engines to Supercharge the Omnibar

Jacob Salmela

Nov 3, 2013 • 2 min read

Requirements For This Walkthrough

Materials

Mac or PC
Chrome

Downloads

None

Knowledge, Skills, and Abilities

Ability to read and understand the components of a search URL
Ability to copy and paste (modifying, if necessary) a URL

Resources

Add an Entry to Chrome’s Custom Search Engines

Navigate to the Custom Search Engine Settings Page

Navigate to chrome://settings/searchEngines or right-click the Omnibar and choose Edit Search Engines…

Add An Entry for Searching Recent Articles on Google

Use this example as a guide for adding other URLs.

Type In the last year into the first field–this is a label for your search engine
Type recent into the second field–this is the keyword you will type to start searching
Paste in this URL to the last field: https://www.google.com/search?hl=en&tbo=1&tbs=qdr:y&q=%s
Click Done

Search Using The Newly-added Search Engine

Now you can use your new search engine from the Omnibar by typing recent and then pressing space or tab.

1. Type recent into the Omnibar

2. Press Tab or Space

3. The Omnibar will change to show the label you created for the search engine

4. Type in a search query

5. Press Enter

Some of my favorite search engines and commands

Search google for pages from the last year only usingrecent

https://www.google.com/search?hl=en&tbo=1&tbs=qdr:y&q=%s

Search bookmarks using bm

chrome://bookmarks/#q=%s

Search Wikipedia TV Episodes using ep

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Search?search=list+of+%s+episodes

Search Lifehacker using lh

http://www.google.com/search?ie=UTF-8&q=site:lifehacker.com+%s

Search browsing history using hist

chrome://history/#q=%s&p=0

Search the site you are currently on usingthissite

javascript:location=’http://www.google.com/search?num=100&q=site:’%20+%20escape(location.hostname)%20+%20’%20%S’%20;%20void%200

Search using a proxy if normal Google searching is blocked usingproxy

http://www.466453.com/search?hl=en&q=%s

http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:%s

http://www.google.ie/gwt/x?u=%s

http://www.gmodules.com/ig/proxy?url=%s

http://translate.google.com/translate?sl=ja&tl=en&u=%s

Export Saved Search Engines

Once you setup all the custom search engines and start using them daily, it is hard to go back to regular searching. That said, if your computer ever crashes or you get a new one, it would be nice to be able back these up and restore them to the new machine.

Enter Commands to Export the Saved Search Engines

Enter the following commands

cd ~/Library/Application\ Support/Google/Chrome/Default/ sqlite3 "Web Data" ".dump keywords" > keywordsbackup.sql

Import

sqlite3 "Web Data" DROP TABLE keywords; .read ./keywordsbackup.sql .quit