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Comment by xiaoma | Hacker News Reader

I agree with you and I rate Firefox search bookmarks as an even bigger plus. Life is short and I don't want to waste it by having to go to a site such as wikipedia or a multi-lingual dictionary first and then search and wait for a second page to load.

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I'm not sure how Chrome's treatment of custom search engines differs from Firefox's. In Chrome, you can associate a URL with a keyword so that when you type "keyword query" into the address bar, the %s parameter in the associated URL is replaced with your query. In what way is Firefox's better?

In Firefox, I can type any of the following into the awesome bar:

   "d victual"  -> looks up "victual"
   "j joust"    -> gets "joust" in a Japanese dictionary
   "wp Boron"   -> displays the wikipedia page "Boron"
   "hn patio11" -> displays HN comments of "patio11"

How can I do this in Chrome? Last time I checked, it wasn't possible. If it is now, then I might start using Chrome for more resource intensive flash games.

Go into your search engine manager (via options or the omnibox's context menu) and edit the keywords for your chosen engine - note that we automatically add engines here with the keyword as the domain, so if you do a search on amazon.com, we'll automatically add amazon with the keyword 'amazon.com' - with autocomplete, this lets you type 'am', then press tab to search (or space-separate the keywork from the term).

You can do the same in Chrome. Check under Options ("Basic" tab) > "Manage" next to Default Search. You should see a list of search engines. If you've already used the search engine and Chrome has picked it up, just select it from the list, "Edit", and customize what keyword you want to use (by default it uses the basic URL). If it's not there, "Add" to make a new one.

For example, for Wikipedia I use: Keyword: wp URL: http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Special:Search&...

Here's the Chrome help page about it: http://www.google.com/support/chrome/bin/answer.py?answer=95... It tells you to use Tab to search, but typing just the keyword and search term works fine (e.g. "wp Google" to look up Google on Wikipedia).

I see from your responses why I couldn't find that-- you're all talking about search engines! I wasn't thinking of HN or bi-lingual dictionaries as search engines and I never even considered managing search engine options rather than just adding a keyword to a bookmark (which Chrome won't let you do).

It's definitely a weird interface and a lot of menus to go through, but once it's set up, it's pretty much the same as FF's search bookmarks. Thanks.

This can also be done in Chrome, see other responses here. What Chrome also does is that it discovers searches by itself, so that when I type "im" and the autocomplete brings up imbd.com I can press tab, my search word and enter. There is no need to manually add the keywords.

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