Add custom Chrome searches for address bar to save your time

Google Chrome

Google Chrome has a nice feature ever since it's earliest versions, which allows you to search from the address bar, customize search engines and their keywords, and define your own searches. Using this feature, you can save a lot of time and speed up your daily search-related tasks. In this article, we will look at how you can define and use your own searches in Google Chrome with some popular examples.

To define your own search engine keyword, you need to open the Chrome browser and enter the following text in its address bar:

chrome://settings/searchEngines

Under the Other search engines section, you can enter any third-party online service which has a search box and can define an address bar shortcut for it. This can be extremely useful and saves a lot of time. For example, let's add the Google Translate web service to translate the contents of the address bar from English to Italian directly.

  1. Enter the 'Italian translation' text as a new search engine name. The name can be anything descriptive.
  2. Enter 'it' as the shortcut
  3. Enter the following line into the URL field:
    http://translate.google.ru/#en|it|%s

  4. Click Done.

From now on, when you enter 'it something' in the address bar of Google Crhome, it will open the page with the text which is already translated to Italian!
For example, type the following:

it bread

Here are a few other useful aliases that you can add to your Chrome browser (name, alias, url format) :

  • Wikipedia w http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Search?search=%s
  • Google images img http://images.google.com/images?hl=en&source=imghp&q=%s&btnG=Search+Images&gbv=2&aq=f&aqi=&aql=&oq=
  • Google Play Apps app https://play.google.com/store/search?c=apps&q=%s
  • Duck Duck Go ddg https://duckduckgo.com/?q=%s

That's it! Now you can open a Wikipedia article on some topic, or see some images using Google Images directly from the address bar by typing w <topic> or img <image topic> respectively.

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Author: Sergey Tkachenko

Sergey Tkachenko is a software developer who started Winaero back in 2011. On this blog, Sergey is writing about everything connected to Microsoft, Windows and popular software. Follow him on Telegram, Twitter, and YouTube.

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