This sounds fancier than what it actually is, but can help reduce some daily friction using the internet. This hack allows you to make queries to websites straight from the search bar. For example, rather than going to https://drive.google.com/drive/u/0/my-drive and then typing into the search “blog”, you can do this in one motion with custom search engines.
- Go to chrome://settings.
- Go to “Manage search engines”.
- Scroll down and “Add” “Other search engines”. You should see three empty fields.
- Give your Search engine whatever name you like.
- Set your keyword to something quick and easy, but also something you wouldn’t type in a normal Google search. The keyword is what you will be typing before your future search bar queries.
- For Google Drive, I have it as “dv”.
- For the third field, paste the URL you would be at for the search. An easy way to find this is to do a query via the website and copy the URL after the results appear, and then replace the text in the URL that match your query with “%s”.
- For example, when I make a search for documents that have the word “blog” on my Google Drive, the resulting URL is “https://drive.google.com/drive/u/0/search?q=blog”. Noticing how “blog” appears after “q=”, it would then be a reasonable prediction that other queries would follow the same pattern, so I type in the third field, “https://drive.google.com/drive/u/0/search?q=%s”.
Chrome does this automatically for some websites, but you can do this for other websites you frequent, as well as change the keyword for existing sites.
Note: this requires being able to navigate to chrome://settings.
Kevin, I am really amazed with your post. This is what I needed! I am always looking out for shortcuts on my computer, so I very much appreciate the hack that you have provided. It is quite tiring to go onto a website and then make a query, although I guess we are all to used to it. I will definitely use this shortcut, so thanks for sharing it with us!
I applaud your knowledge on detailed shortcuts like this, I myself have never dug that far into my chrome settings out of my own fear of accidentally enabling some super-specific setting deep in the settings. I initially thought that this feature functioned like the bookmarks bar and was a little confused as to why anyone would do all this to achieve something the software engineers at google solved a long time ago. However after reading this post a couple of times I stopped to set this up as it would save myself and I imagine many other students from a step in our daily tasks of searching for drive files.