Habitually Good

One of the things that I find myself doing quite frequently is using Image Search (whether Bing or Google, though Bing is better). And I am also used to just typing the search term in my browser address bar and pressing enter. Normally to do image search, you would have to either go to the respective image search page first, and then enter your search term there (but then you are not using the enter search term in address bar shortcut). Or another way is to enter the search term in the address bar, press enter, and then choose the Image search link from the top menu of the search engine (again, pretty clunky).

So, how do we solve this problem? Well, Chrome offers us a very cool functionality (which FireFox also has, I believe) where I can add many search engines to address bar, and I can choose which one to call by adding a shortcut word/letter before my search term.

Let me show you how you can do this, and let me take Bing image search as the example (since I use this).

Before you proceed, please read this article on how to add a new search engine to Chrome. Once you have read it you will know that you can easily go to the Tools menu, choose Options, and then click on the Manage button under the “Default Search” section to open the Search Engines dialog box.

Here, click the Add button and add the following values in the three fields:

• Name – Bing Image Search
• Keyword – i (notice this is a small ‘i’. It can be anything you like. This is the shortcut key that you will use to access the search from the address bar)
• URL - http://www.bing.com/images/search?q=%s

Press OK, and close the dialog boxes. Now, go to your browser address bar, and press i followed by the keyword you are searching for. Chrome will now directly show you results from Bing Image Search. What’s more the moment you type anything after i followed by a space, Chrome will let you know that it is going to use the Bing Image Search for this search (see below):

So, now it is very easy for me to search for images by employing this shortcut. This type of a function is not limited to search engines. You can add any site which support searching through query strings as shown above (in fact Chrome adds any site on which it detects functionality such as this automatically).

I have shortcuts for images, videos, and my own blog (almost all WordPress blogs support a search query syntax, so can be easily added here).

Adding Site Specific Quick Search

Actually, you don’t even need for the site to support such a syntax, and can use the power of the search engines to make a site specific quick search (although I can’t understand why a site won’t have search syntax). Here’s an example of how to do this (and I am taking my blog as an example, even though I can use the query string syntax to search on it):

• Name – Habitually Good
• Keyword – HG
• URL – http://www.bing.com/search?q=site:blog.gadodia.net+%s

Now, if you type “HG “ followed by any search query, you will get results only from my blog. Of course, this will work with Google as well.

Go ahead and add shortcuts to your heart’s content and make yourself more productive.

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