Manage search engines

27 October 2013 | Posted in Tech | Comments Off on Manage search engines

Manage search engines

Google Chrome lets you search the web directly from the address bar at the top of the browser window (also called the “omnibox”). When you type search terms in the bar, it’ll automatically return search results from a search engine, like Google. You can specify the search engine that the address bar should use by default.

Set your default search engine

By default, your address bar uses Google to return search results, but you can choose to use another search engine instead.

  1. Click the Chrome menu Chrome menu on the browser toolbar.
  2. Select Settings and find the “Search” section.
  3. Select the search engine you want to use from the menu. If the search engine you want to use doesn’t appear in the menu, click Manage search engines.
  4. In the Search Engines dialog that appears, select the search engine that you’d like to use from the list.
  5. Click the Make default button that appears at the end of the row. Don’t see the button? You may need to edit its URL. See details below on setting up a search engine.

If the search engine you want to use isn’t on this list, see the steps below to add it as a new search engine option.

Add, edit, or remove search engines

Google Chrome automatically saves a list of the search engines you’ve come across while browsing the web. For example, if you visit http://www.youtube.com, the browser automatically detects and adds the YouTube search engine to the list of search engines that you can access. You’ll then be able to search YouTube directly from the address bar without even visiting the site.

To manually add, edit, or remove search engines from the browser, follow the steps below.

  1. Click the Chrome menu Chrome menu on the browser toolbar.
  2. Select Settings and find the “Search” section.
  3. Click Manage search engines.
    • Add a search engine: Scroll to the bottom of the dialog and fill out the fields to set up the search engine.
    • Edit a search engine: Select the search engine from the list and click the field you want to modify.
    • Remove a search engine: Select the search engine and click the x that appears at the end of the row.

See details on setting up a search engine

Here are some tips on the info you should provide for each search engine:

  • Add a new search engine: Enter a label for the search engine.
  • Keyword: Enter the text shortcut you want to use for the search engine. You can use the keyword to quickly access the search engine via the address bar.
  • URL: Enter the web address for the search engine. To find the web address:
    1. Go to the search engine you want to add.
    2. Do a search.
    3. Copy and paste the web address of the search results page into the URL field. Keep in mind that the URL for the search results page is different from the website URL. For example, while you’d go to http://www.google.com to access Google, the URL you’d add here is for the search results page if you’ve searched for xyz, http://www.google.com/search?q=XYZ.
    4. Replace the search term in the URL with %s. To continue the Google search engine example, you’d end up with http://www.google.com/search?q=%s as your final search engine URL. When you type a search in the address bar, %s will automatically be replaced by your search term.

Make sure you include %s in the URL. Otherwise, you won’t be able to set this search engine as your default search engine.