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Desktop Chrome Superpowers: Custom Search Engines
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Desktop Chrome Superpowers: Custom Search Engines

·635 words·3 mins·
Jared Stockton
Author
Jared Stockton
Solving Mobile Business Problems through Architecture, Documentation, Mentoring, and Collaboration
Table of Contents
Part 1 in a series where I explore some of my favorite Chrome Desktop features. See Part 2 to learn the ins and outs of Tab Search.

Why should I care? I just use Google, DuckDuckGo, etc as my go-to search engine?
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I also primarily use Google for web search! The functionality we’re actually going to use is the Site Search aspect of the Custom Search Engine feature.

The primary benefit you’ll gain by using this feature is faster navigation to types of web pages you frequently visit using templated data input (i.e. pages that shouldn’t be bookmarked as they don’t serve a long term purpose but rather need temporary attention / triaging now) in Chrome in your day to day work.

Example Jira ticket details custom search engine usage flow
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Here is an example step by step to load a specific Jira ticket in a new tab:

  1. Create a new tab (cmd + T on macOS or ctrl + T on windows/linux)
  2. Type the shortcut: j
  3. Hit tab (or space — configurable in Settings)
  4. Type the query: JIRA-321
  5. Hit enter

The Jira custom search engine will navigate directly to the ticket details for ticket ID JIRA-321!

What are some good example Use Cases for a custom search engine?
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1. Looking up Jira tickets by Ticket ID
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As mentioned earlier, you can quickly load a specific Jira issue by typing the shortcut followed by typing or copy/pasting the Jira ticket ID.

Using j followed by PROJ-1 and PROJ-2 to lookup Jira tickets

  • Search engine name: Jira
  • Shortcut: j
  • URL with %s in place of query: https://foo.atlassian.net/browse/%s
Note: Replace the base URL to match your Jira instance.

2. Searching Confluence
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You can quickly perform searches within Confluence for evergreen pages that you already know exist (release checklists, feature pages, glossaries, onboarding pages) OR start a search for pages matching your query.

Using c followed by har and mermaid to lookup Confluence pages about .har files and mermaid js

  • Search engine name: Confluence
  • Shortcut: c
  • URL with %s in place of query: https://foo.atlassian.net/wiki/search?text=%s&title=true

Note: Replace the base URL to match your Confluence instance.

Note 2: Adjust the search filters in Confluence to determine which you’d like to use with the query and modify the URL template above. For example, consider removing &title=true for the widest possible search.

Alright, I’m convinced! How do I set this up?
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Follow the instructions in the Chrome Support doc to configure your computer. Once you’ve added one custom search engine, follow the same process to add additional custom search engines with site search.

How do I create my own custom search engines?
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To find good custom search engine candidates for the sites, services, tools, and portals that you frequently access, you’ll want to:

  1. Navigate to specific pages of interest that you’d like to immediately open (similar to the Jira ticket details shortcut) and look for the part of the URL that you can swap out with %s and manually type in using the custom search engine.
  2. Find the search functionality within the particular site and observe how the URL changes when you search for different queries. Swap out that part of the URL with %s and manually type it in using the custom search engine.

Once you have the URL and %s pieces identified, just create a new custom search engine with your desired shortcut and try it out.

Feel free to share this article on your platform of choice and comment with any of your go-to custom search engines. Thanks for reading!