Using other search engines with Google Chrome

Google Chrome Version 12

Chrome address bar (Omnibox) allows users to directly search the internet. Users can set a search engine as their default engine and at any time they can use the address bar to perform their searches. That’s a very helpful feature of Chrome however we sometimes require to use multiple search engines or even search content of certain sites.

To accommodate this need, Chrome allows you to define search engines and quickly and easily access them.

The following shows you how you can add Wikipedia as a search engine to Chrome.

• Open Chrome and click on the wrench button.
• Click on Options
• From the left pane choose Basics
• Click on Manage search engines…
• At this point a page opens up containing two section namely Default search options and Other search engines. Under Other search engines, you can define your own search engine. At the bottom of the section, you’ll see Add a new search engine. That is where you specify the name you would call your new search engine with. I’ll call it Wikipedia; you may choose any name you’d like. In the second column or Keyword, you need to specify a shorthand for your search engine; this can be anything however you need to remember it when you want to search. I will use _wiki. The reason for starting with underscore is so Chrome doesn’t confuse it with other things it cached such as you previous search queries.In the third column or URL, specify the URL of the search engine. It is not always URL of the website that the search is provided within. This is very crucial to find the correct URL since if you specify an incorrect URL, you will not be able to search at all.To find the correct URL, you need to lookup a word using your search engine and take the URL that you land on and replace the word you searched with %s.

Here is how it should be done for Wikipedia.

• 1. Go to http://www.wikipedia.com
• 2. In the search box type in MySearch and push enter
• 3. You will land on a page with the following URL http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mysearch
• 4. Replace MySearch with %s as follows http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%s

That’s it.

Now here is how you use the new search engine:

• 1. Open a new tab
• 2. type _wiki
• 3. Push Tab and notice that Chrome address bar at the left-side showing Search Wikipedia.
• 4. Type your query and push enter

Note that Chrome allows you to change the default search engine. If you set your entry in Search Engines page to default, you can type your query directly in the address bar and push enter to search; You can skip steps 2 and 3.