Hacker News Reader

Comment by jackfoxy | Hacker News Reader

I only wish Chrome would add a second search box, like IE and FF do. I have never figured out how to get the keyword for another search engine (Wikipedia) to work satisfactorily in Chrome's combination url/search entry area.

View on HN

Works for me. In preferences, manage search engines. All or most of the search engines you've used in the past should be there. Edit the keyword to the keyword of your choice (for Wikipedia I use "wp"). In the omni bar, type "wp", space, query, enter. Alternatively you can use a tab instead of a space and this makes it more obvious that you are searching.

OK, so I update my search preferences to make "wp" the Wikipedia key word. (I think, ok, maybe "w" was too short or something.)

Close the browser. Reopen. Check the options again. (Still there.) Type wp (so far so good, the Chrome hints drop-down looks like I'm going to hit Wikipedia) space, "San Francisco" (no quotes) ... and oops, the hints have changed to "Google Search" (as soon as I type the first character.

That's puzzling. Don't know if it will help, but for reference I'm running the dev channel build on OS X.

I'm running 4.0.249.78 (36714) on Win 7 64-bit right now (where I get a slightly different problem than I described), but my description is from the latest build on 32-bit Win 7.

Hey I realize most of you guys like the single omni-box, (I consider it a waste of real estate), but at least make the second FireFox/IE type search box optional. Let the user decide.

I have no problems making it optional, as long as many similar options don't add bloat over time. But to fix your problem you might want to run either the beta channel or dev channel builds.

Dev channel: http://www.google.com/chrome/eula.html?extra=devchannel Beta channel: http://www.google.com/chrome/eula.html?extra=betachannel

I wish all other browsers would drop the unnecessary secondary box when they could be doing the searching in the address bar like Chrome.

Yeah, within a week of starting to use Chrome I started trying to type search terms in Safari's URL field.

That feature could seriously be a deterrent for switching away from Chrome or Firefox.

In Chrome, you can also use domain specific searches: start typing the domain name, and when autocomplete matches the domain, press tab, and the location bar becomes a site-specific search. e.g:

    ul <tab> <search terms>

expands to ultimate-guitar.com to search for guitar tabs

    en <tab> <search terms>

expands to en.wikipedia.org to search wikipedia

It's great that it automatically picks up search boxes in websites. So this works on any website that you have searched in the past - you don't have to manually set it up.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com