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Comment by nequo | Hacker News Reader

For these situations, it is useful to type

  ?example.zip

and force the browser to perform a search.

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Wow, here I am having used Chrome and Firefox for a decade and a half, and I never knew the "?" trick.

That is super-useful, thanks.

Why not "g example.zip"? It is faster to type, also configurable what to do.

Or ctrl+e, ctrl+v, if your left hand is there.

I don't understand. "?" already works. "g" doesn't do anything, no matter if I follow it with a space or a tab. It's also not faster to type, since "?" doesn't need to be followed by whitespace.

g and space are both home finger keys though. Question mark is not nearly so easy to type. I think "g " might win out.

To get it to work I think you need to configure g as a bookmark shortcut though, so it's not built-in.

In Chrome, you can change the shortcut for each search engine in the settings. The default shortcut for google is "google.com".

"g " does whatever you want, and it has cross browser support. "?" does whatever the browser you use happen to do. Typing-wise you may be right, it depends how do you type, or where are your hands.

I also like to use ctrl+K to search from the address bar.

It's nice because usually I use ctrl+L to type in the address bar and that's a similar shortcut for times when my search looks like a URL.

Or just type a space in the query (example zip). Search engines know what you mean by that.

Nice. I usually just wrap it in double quotes, but this is slightly easier.

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