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Comment by stephengillie | Hacker News Reader

If you can live without the bang, you could just add a search engine to Chrome with the text "gh". Then, prepending "gh" to a search would just search Github.

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The thing about bangs is that it's a curated, auto-updating list of shortcuts though. I could install my own but with ddg, I just throw a ! in front of the site and usually it works!

Chrome auto added Github search in my url bar - g<Tab>search.

What we actually needs is a web standard list (via API) that provides the shortcuts and the search URL like so (as an example):

  !gh { https://github.com/search&q=$QUERY$ }
  !ebay { http://www.ebay.co.uk/sch/i.html?&_nkw=$QUERY$ }

Then all browsers (and other apps) could provide these standard shortcuts in their search functions.

We have such a standard http://www.opensearch.org/Home. This works at least in chrome, so if I want to search github, in the address bar I enter "g<tab>search term<enter>".

Wasn't aware of this, thanks.

Reading the site though, it seems poorly adopted? And also not automated (the user has to actively install SearchProviders? Most users don't bother.)

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