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Comment by ankimal | Hacker News Reader

I m mostly always doing 'site:www.stackoverflow.com how do I do XYZ ?' in google ..

To conveniently search all of their stackexchange sites using Google including stackoverflow.com, try the search box on http://stackexchange.com/.

This somewhat helps with a problem they are facing which is fragmentation of questions and answers across their sites. For example, for Ubuntu you might need to search three or four of their sites before finding an answer to an issue you are having.

Duck Duck Go makes this a bit easier, just say !so xyz.

Even faster, I've setup "keyword searches" in Firefox (http://kb.mozillazine.org/Using_keyword_searches). I created the following bookmark:

  Name     : [so] Search StackOverflow     // the "[so]" here is just a mnemonic
  Location : http://www.google.com/search?q=site%3Astackoverflow.com+%s
  Keyword  : so

Then, when I want to search for "vim vs emacs" on SO, I open a new tab (Ctrl + T), type "so vim vs emacs", and press enter. This searches "site:stackoverflow.com vim vs emacs" on Google.

I have a similar smart bookmarks setup for HN searches, and you could get more creative if you want (DuckDuckGo search, or even a custom StackExchange search like rayvega mentioned, using "http://stackexchange.com/search?q=%s in the location field).

Chrome has something similar: http://www.google.com/support/chrome/bin/answer.py?hl=en&...

Just to clarify, in Chrome this works automatically. After performing one search on Stack Overflow, you can now start typing "stack overflow" into the address bar. As soon as you see that the first autocompletion is StackOverflow.com, you can hit tab and perform a search.

This works automatically with any site you perform a search on, with no need to configure anything. One of the main reasons I moved to Chrome after years of being an FF user.

Weird... it used to be on duckduckgo that if a Stack Overflow result was your first result, the answer would actually be displayed as well, but that doesn't seem to be working right now: http://duckduckgo.com/?q=Netbeans+Forwarded+over+X11+Font

You can always just search Stack Overflow directly (I consider it to have an adequate search engine), which is easily done in Chrome by typing stackoverflow.com (often only the first two characters), tab, and then your query.

you can drop the "www." prefix, btw.

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