Be a search bar hero with Google Chrome!

Image sourced from Wikipeida

Be a search bar hero with Google Chrome! (Quick Post)

Getting tired of having to type in your favorite search engine's address every single time you want to search? Is your default search not cutting it and you end up typing your way to an outside engine? Are you doing a research project and rely on several search engines at once? 

I don't have to tell you its annoying typing in Google.com, Yahoo.com, or any other search and have to wait for it to load, then type again after clicking in the text field and so on and so forth. It gets redundant. With today's day and age we're in the fast lane and we need our results even faster than the few clicks and loads we have to go through. Search no more. Google Chrome has a feature that will solve this.

What is Google Chrome?

For beginners and for those who aren't super tech savvy, Google Chrome is a web browser. It allows you to view the internet. You can compare it to other browsers like Opera, Internet explorer, Safari, Silk, and Mozilla. Really, the list goes on.

What makes it different? It's light-ish weight which means it isn't constantly hogging up your computer resources, it's safe, and the best part is that it is 100% FREE. Chrome also rates as number one on many tech sights and my personal favorite for the many customization features that come packed in it. One of which is what this post is about.

Additionally, unlike other browsers, this feature from this post is not an extension, app, or anything like that. Which means you don't need to download any third party anythings! It's built in and ready to go! Virus and malware free! Safe! 

Teach me your search bar ways!

Before we get into that let me tell you how this works. When you enable this feature for each of the search engines you would like to do this for you will only need to type in a keyword, number, or letter then hit space or tab and then what you would like to search for. As a result you will instantly get the search results when you hit enter. It's that easy.

Lets get to it!

Step 1: First you will need to right click on your search bar at the top of the browser and click on Edit search engines... It will look like the following image.

Step 2: Your chrome settings will load and automatically bring you right to the search engine settings. First you will see Default search engines which will have some useful pre-configured engines with keyword searches like what we're about to do. What you'll be looking for is Other search engines. When you find this area, click Add. It should look like the following

Step 3: This is the where it begins to get tricky. But, I'm confident you can do it! Getting this wrong won't destroy your computer or break the internet or anything :-). 

• First a pop up will prompt you to give your search engine a name. You can name it anything you want like in the example. This is just to organize all the customs searches you'll be making. 
• Second you'll need to make a keyword to type for your search's "easy mode"
• Third is where the magic happens. You will need to copy and paste your search address and replace a little of it. 

It should look something like the following.

Step 4: This is the hardest part, which really isn't too bad. You will need to make a mock search on the desired search field/text box/ search bar on your desired sight. For this example I used my blog. I typed in unicorn magic because unicorns rock! 

Despite not having a desired search result it gives us what we need, an address. This address would look something like this: https://www.ridiculouslyben.com/search?q=unicorn+magic. You are going to copy this link and paste it in the last field of this pop up. Without going into too much details, we are going to swap the search result which would be unicorn+magic with %s . So as an end result your new link that you just pasted should look like this: https://www.ridiculouslyben.com/search?q=%s . For further clarity here's another image.

Now you are the search bar hero! 

The grasshopper has become the master. Now try your search. In the case of this example I used "ben" as my keyword. Now when I type "ben" in my search bar and hit space bar or tab, I can search for anything on ridiculouslyben.com. It will look like this:

Now push enter and it will look up "I am now the search bar master!!!" on my website.

Will this work on any search engine or website?

As long as there is a search bar, search text field, etc. You will be able to do this. It can be used on school websites, work websites and modules that use the internet, stores, etc. As long as you are able to get that address result and follow these steps you can do it for just about anything.