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Comment by ddw | Hacker News Reader

I consider myself sophisticated and I still use Google for something like Rap Genius:

"rap genius kendrick lamar swimming pools" would get me there quicker than any other way.

It's incredible that now that search string sends me to other pages that link to RG's lyrics but not directly to theirs.

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That's why I /really/ like Chromes "tab to search" feature. When I visit a site with a search field Chrome remembers it. When I start typing the domain the URL bar says "Press TAB to search X", then you type in your search terms.

We're switching from Chrome to Firefox at work and their site-search is incredibly clunky in comparison.

It's pretty easy to manage site searches in Firefox -- go to rapgenius.com, click on dropdown in the FF search box, click on add "rap genius", and that's it. Also, you are able to set keyword to it in "manage search engines" dialog in the same dropdown, for example "rg" -- so you will be able to write just "rg song" in the address bar to search on rapgenius.

Well that's different than searching for the URL (though I would suggest using tab to search the site within Chrome). I bet RapGenius got thousands of referrals from the keyword "rapgenius.com" per day. Obviously that will come back rather quickly, but it's something a lot of the HN audience would not normally think of happening.

If you actually knew how to use Google this wouldn't be a problem. The `site:` filter is your friend.

How is that faster? You're adding five characters + the .com , and will get exactly the same result.

Or just set up a custom search engine in Chrome, eg:

chrome://settings/searchEngines

search engine: rapgenius.com

keyword: rg

url: http://rapgenius.com/search?q=%s

Then just type rg<tab> in the omnibox and search for whatever you want, and get taken to rg's serp.

For most sites, Chrome should do this by default and the default keyword is just the site's URL. So simply:

    rapgenius.com<tab>search terms

autocomplete is supported so you can also just do

    ra<tab>search terms

if rapgenius.com is your first autocomplete result for "ra"

This feels like a bit of a regression. I used to be able to just use the automatic search, but it seems to be breaking for more and more sites recently. Even sites it used to pick up automatically, like tpb, now need to be manually specified.

And there's still no damned excuse for them not being able to search maps.google.com from the omnibox.

aren't we overthinking this a little much?

You are coming off as incredibly pretentious. I was unaware that by typing in the search field and expecting relevant results I wasn't using Google correctly.

It's not a "problem." I'm just incredibly lazy when it comes to looking up rap lyrics and it works for me.

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