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Tips 'n Tricks

Create Custom Search Engine of Any Website in Google Chrome

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You might already know how to do a search on ‘Google’ from Chrome address bar aka omnibox. In this post, I will show you how to create a custom search engine of any website you want.

Once you setup your custom search engine, you just need to precede the query with a special keyword and hit enter. e.g. To search for ‘Google Chrome’ on SumTips, you can just type in st followed by your query.

Using this feature you will be able to launch a search on Wikipedia, Facebook, IMDB, YouTube and any other website you want. At the end of this post I have listed some search engines, assign any keyword and use them.

How to create a custom search engine?

In this example I am going to create a search for IMDB.

Step 1:
Go to the IMDB home page and conduct a search for a film. After you search, copy the URL in the address bar.

I had searched for “Pirates of the Caribbean.”

In this URL you need to change the underlined word in the next step.

Step 2:
Right-click in the address bar and select ‘Edit Search Engines...’

You may find IMDB, along with many other search engines are already added in your browser. This is because Chrome automatically adds search engines to the list after you search from a site. Here you can just change the website keyword to the one you want. If it’s not there click on ‘Add.’

Enter a name and easy-to-remember keyword. In the URL field, paste in our IMDB URL we copied in step 1. The part where the search query is, replace that with %s and hit ‘OK.’ That’s it!

Now, whenever you need to search for a movie on IMDB you can do it directly from the address bar by typing the keyword term.

e.g. for Inception search imdb inception and hit enter.

Some more search engines:

  • Allrecipes:

    • http://allrecipes.com/search/recipes.aspx?withterm=%s

  • Amazon:

    • http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/external-search/?field-keywords=%s&mode=blended

  • Bing:

    • http://www.bing.com/search?q=%s

  • Chrome Webstore:

    • https://chrome.google.com/webstore/search?q=%s

  • Digg:

    • http://digg.com/search?s=%s

  • Facebook:

    • http://www.facebook.com/search/?q=%s

  • Friendfeed:
  • Google Images:

    • http://images.google.com/images?gbv=2&hl=en&q=%s&btnG=Search+Images

  • Google Maps:

    • http://maps.google.com/maps?f=q&source=s_q&hl=es&q=%s

  • I’m Feeling Lucky:

    • http://www.google.com/search?btnI=I%27m+Feeling+Lucky&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8&q=%s

  • IMDB:

    • http://www.imdb.com/find?q=%s

  • Merriam-Webster:

    • http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/%s

  • Twitter:
  • Yahoo:

    • http://search.yahoo.com/search?ei={inputEncoding}&fr=crmas&p=%s

  • YouTube:

    • http://youtube.com/results?search_type=search_videos&search_query=%s&search_sort=relevance

  • Wikipedia:

    • http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Search?search=%s

  • Wolfram:

    • http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=%s

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