Google Chrome automatically detects and adds search engines to to the list of search engines that you can access from the Chrome address bar whenever you do searches on search engines like Google. It keeps a record of the site name, a keyword derived from the site url, and the search url. For example, if you do a search at NullPointer.ph, it saves the following information:
- Name: NullPointer.ph Search
- Keyword: nullpointer.ph
- URL: http://nullpointer.ph//search/?q=%s&t=question
In order to do a quick search for that search engine, simply type the keyword in the address bar, press tab, type your search string and press Enter. This saves you one step from going to the website before performing the actual search.
But since the keyword that Chrome saves is usually the domain name of the website, it is oftentimes longer than what is necessary to do a quick search. Good thing it’s possible to modify the search shortcuts in Chrome. To do so, just click the wrench icon in Google Chrome, click Preferences, select the Basic tab, and click the Manage button under Default Search. From there you’ll see all the search engines that Google Chrome automatically saved for you.
Google Chrome - Search Engines
Just click on any of the search engines and click the Edit button to modify the search engine keyword.
Google Chrome - Edit Search Engine
In this example, after saving the changes, you can already type ‘n’ in the address bar followed by a space and your query string to do a search at NullPointer.ph.
Note: In the first screenshot, I didn’t bother modifying the search keyword for the Google search since it is already set as my default search engine and typing the my query string in the address bar without the search engine keyword will suffice.
Cough, Opera, cough