Chrome: adding shortcuts to bookmarks

In Firefox you can associate shortcuts to your bookmarks, which I used to:
  • quickly open frequently used sites, e.g. Gmail, Facebook, etc. or
  • to open a page with a specific topic, e.g. the Wikipedia article about "Linux" or
  • to trigger a custom search or query, e.g. on Google Translate
Now that I recently switched from Firefox to Chrome I imported my Firefox bookmarks and still had the shortcuts available, but when I edited my bookmarks I couldn't find the option to modify the shortcuts, neither could I add new shortcuts.

After playing around a while I finally found something called "Search Engines", which is a bit of a misleading name, but does exactly the same as bookmark shortcuts in Firefox.

You get there by right clicking on the URL bar / search bar and selecting Edit Search Engines...

Now, when you click on Add you get a form like this, where Keyword is the shortcut you use in the address bar, URL the site where you wanna go with %s as a placeholder for your search term.



In this case to get to the Wikipedia article for "Linux" I would just have to enter "wiki Linux" in the address bar and I get directly there. 

In case you wanna go to a static URL like Gmail you just don't use the %s placeholder and enter the URL completely.

2 comments:

  1. Stefan,

    in case of searching a specific site, you might want to try out a quick search in the omnibox:
    http://chrome.blogspot.com/2009/07/tip-quick-site-searches-with-omnibox.html

    It's amazingly efficient and works for almost every site you have visited and searched manually once.


    Enjoy,
    Thomas

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  2. It seems, what it actually does is the same, but automated. It adds sites on which you've used "search" before to the Chrome's search engines settings.

    Very cool feature. Thank you Thomas for sharing :-)

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