Hacking Google Chrome’s Search Engine Settings for Efficiency

Introduction

I have been sharing my usage of Google Chrome’s search engine setting around our office for some time and now want to share how I use this feature, possibly in unintended ways, to be more efficient in many day-to-day navigation of websites and web applications.

Basic Usage

Day after day I find myself navigating constantly between different web resources that assist me with all my work tasks.  I have utilized bookmarks and the bookmark bar in Chrome to varying degrees of success.  For those tools that I use frequently, and especially if there is any type of query involved, I use Google Chrome’s search engine setting to customize my navigation experience.  Let me give you some examples to demonstrate what I am talking about.  If you navigate in Chrome to the settings “…” menu in the toolbar and then select “Settings” (or CMD+, on Mac and CTRL+, on PC) you can then access the “search engine” option in the left navigation.  Upon load, you will see some basic overall setting options for the search engine within Chrome.  The part I am demonstrating today is a bit deeper.  Click on the “Manage search engines” option and you should be presented with a list of “Default search engines” and “Other search engines” sections.

In “Default search engines” you will see the core website search options such as Google, Yahoo!, Bing, etc.  The next section “Other search engines” is where we can start to take control of how we search from within Google Chrome.  These “Other search engines” get added as we navigate the web.  As an example, I can see in my list a reference to GitHub with a keyword of “github.com” and a “Query URL” of “https://github.com/search?q=%s&ref=opensearch”.  This is pretty straightforward, when I type “github.com” I am prompted to hit tab on my keyboard (right side of the address bar) and then it accepts the entry of a search string.  If I type “bootstrap” and hit enter my address bar is transformed into “https://github.com/search?q=bootstrap&ref=opensearch” with my query of “bootstrap” placed where the “%s” is located in the query URL.  This leads directly to the GitHub search results showing the results for a search for “bootstrap”.

As a bit of background, these searches are made possible as a result of the OpenSearch specification.  For your reference, the specific implementation by GitHub of OpenSearch can be views from their opensearch.xml site file.  As indicated on the OpenSearch specification:

Search clients can use OpenSearch description documents to learn about the public interface of a search engine. These description documents contain parameterized URL templates that indicate how the search client should make search requests. Search engines can use the OpenSearch response elements to add search metadata to results in a variety of content formats.

More specifically regarding OpenSearch description documents:

An OpenSearch description document can be used to describe the web interface of a search engine.

These search engines are widely defined and available on the web and after review of your search engines in Chrome, I believe you will see many that already exist as entries based on your website usage over time.

Custom Search Usage

Although this is a nice feature out of the box I have taken my search engine customization to the next level and this is where I am realizing my efficiency gains.  My first customization has been to review the tools I use daily in the hunt for any that offer search options.  I customize their keyword to something that makes sense to me.  As an example, I would adjust the keyword for GitHub to be “gh”.  This would allow me to move to the address bar (CMD+L on Mac and CTRL+L on PC) and type “gh” then tab and do the same search mentioned above.  It is basic but if you search GitHub all day this can really reduce the number of clicks and time you spend navigating to the page and into a search.

In our company, we use a lot of Atlassian products (most notably Jira and BitBucket) and I find myself loading these tools frequently throughout my day.  Here are some standard and other not so standard search engines I have established for my use.

Custom Placeholder Usage

In addition to searching on various sites, I also use the search engines within Chrome to form URLs with a “%s” placeholder.  Let me explain, I navigate to Jira tickets regularly by ticket name such as “ABC-123”.  In this case, it isn’t technically a search but rather some text I need to be inserted into a complex URL so I navigate directly to the ticket.  For this purpose, I have set up a keyword of “ticket” and after typing this and hitting tab I can simply type (or paste) the ticket number “ABC-123” and then enter to load the ticket to be viewed.  Specifically, in the query URL of “[Our Company Jira]/browse/%s” the ticket number is appended to the URL.  In this usage, the ticket simply replaces the “%s” so I don’t have to remember this URL or alternatively navigate to the page and then use the sites built-in search to find the ticket.

Custom Bookmark Usage

The last, and most basic, way I use this search engine customization is to simply specify URLs I navigate to frequently and associate those with a custom keyword of my choosing.  I find myself hitting CMD+T (CTRL+T on PC) to load a new tab and typing these keywords and hitting enter.  This allows me to navigate quickly to where I am looking to go.

So, why not just use bookmarks?  First, my goal is to stay on the keyboard whenever possible for speed.  Secondly, I find my bookmark bar runs out of space quite quickly based on all the places I would like to have at my fingertips.  Here are some examples of some of my Atlassian related customer search engines:

Other Tools

I have explored the usage of other tools for this same purpose.  The main tool that some of you may prefer is the Alfred productivity app for Mac or possibly a productivity equivalent on the PC.  My initial exploration of this has been to create custom workflows that load resources based on keywords.  This workflow capability offered within Alfred is very advanced and should support keyword placement and searching within URLs as I have outlined above.

Summary

I am not sure how much of this functionality is being used as intended.  I speculate that the placeholder and more basic bookmark usage are not what was targeted with this Google Chrome feature.  Regardless, this has increased the speed at which I can work and I hope what I have outlined here can increase your efficiency too.