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by quaunaut 4252 days ago
That doesn't really fix what I like most.

I like being able to hit a, see Amazon.com hilighted, hit tab, and have that be searching Amazon.

Or to do the same thing with GMail, Wikipedia, Youtube. It's the core functionality I like most with Chrome.

4 comments

How do I enable the Omnibar search behavior you describe? When I enter "a" in the Omnibar, I see amazon.com in the Omnibar drop down list, but when I hit tab, Chrome just highlights the next item in the drop down list. It doesn't search Amazon. Have you manually added Amazon to Chrome's "Manage search engines" list?

Firefox has something similar: "Keyword Searches" bookmarks. I define my own search shortcuts, such as "am" for Amazon, "imdb" for IMDB, "nf" for Netflix, and "w" for Wikipedia. Using "am Harry Potter" or imdb or nf or w will use those respective website's own search forms to find "Harry Potter".

https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/how-search-from-address...

http://kb.mozillazine.org/Using_keyword_searches

From my experience, Chrome seems to learn about a search engine by using it. So search for something on amazon.com and it should start working.
Nice! After loading amazon.com from the Omnibar, Chrome learned that "am" was "Search Amazon Search".
Wow, I didn't have any idea that that existed. That doesn't look discoverable at all and the Chome UI provides feedback that Firefox doesn't - but the ergonomics are just as good and that's enough for me to switch my home computers back to defaulting to Firefox.
You can do that in Firefox and with more granular control. If you right click in a search box you can choose to "Add a keyword for this search" and then you can make the keyword whatever you choose.

For example: I have a folder in my bookmarks containing like Youtube which is this url https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=%s&oq=&gs_l= associated with the keyword "yt" so I can type yt <search term> and it loads the Youtube results. I've also added one for the Mozilla Developer Network (mdn <search term>), Python Documentation (py2 <term> or py3 <term>) and I add others as I use them more.

I use that, but it isn't as good as it used to be in Opera. Opera auto-completed your search using the target search engine's autocompletion. I don't use Chrome often enough to know if it does that too, but it might make me switch. (I switched from Opera to Firefox because of the plugin ecosystem.)
Chrome has all those features too, it let's you add search engines via right-clicking a searchbox, ,you can change the search keyword, and "<search-keyword> <search-terms>" in the omnibar works as described by you.
My solution to this issue is to use DuckDuckGo along with their bang commands [1]. So if you were to look for a replacement Wacom stylus on amazon, you would input "!a wacom stylus".

DDG bangs works with all large website or search engine (!g for google, !w for wikipedia), and with smaller, specialized one as well (I can look up words definition in the Trésors de la Langue Française Informatisé with !tlfi , and a particular protein in the Protein DataBase with !pdb).

If you use the official extension[2], you also get search suggestion out of the search box

[1] https://duckduckgo.com/bang.html [2] https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/duckduckgo-fo...

I agree, this is the single most lacking feature in Firefox. That said, I gladly sacrifice it to get a bit less under Google's control.