Access Any Web Site's Search System Direct From Your Chrome Browser [1]

You're probably very accustomed to typing web URLs into Chrome's address bar. If you use that particular browser, it's the way that you tell it where you want to go. But if truth be told, it's not actually an address bar. Google calls it an Omni Bar because of all the extra features it has. And here's one of them which you probably don't know about, but which is actually really, really neat.

Imagine that you want to search Youtube for a particular word or phrase (say, Julia Roberts). Do you currently go to the Youtube web site and then type Julia Roberts into the search box on that site? Would you like to be able to just type:

y julia roberts

into the Chrome omnibar and have your browser do all the hard work for you? If so, here's how.

In Chrome, right-click on the address bar (sorry, Omni Bar) and choose Edit Search Engines. In the "add a new search engine" box, type Youtube. In the Keyword column, just type y. And in the "URL with %s in place of query" box, type:

https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=%s [3]

Now, go back to Chrome. In the omni bar, type the letter y followed by a space. Instantly, the browser says Search Youtube. Carry on typing your search query (Julia Roberts in this case). Hit Return and you'll find yourself right at the Youtube search results page.

You can add any site's search facility to the list of Chrome's search engines. Add Facebook for example, with a keyword of f, and you can search it with just a single letter. Or even your own company web site, if you want one. The only tricky part is working out the correct URL to add. To do this, search the site manually to start with, then copy the address where you end up. Just replace the search query with %s and you're all ready to go.