Searching Browser Internals on Chrome
Sun, Jan 22, 2012I recently switched to Chrome in celebration of [Tyler][1] joining the Chrome team at Google, and it’s been really great. The Omnibox is perhaps one of the best features, but the experience out of the box did leave some things lacking.
As a user, I often visit websites and bookmark them to save them for later reference, or I don’t, and I just expect to be able to find it in the browser history. This seems pretty standard. My thought is that the Omnibox should be more helpful in this process. Sure, I could just search again or use one of the few history or bookmark suggestions that pop down, but sometimes I really just want to get a quick search within the scope of things in my history or bookmarks, perhaps with the ease of a search engine keyword. Fun fact, you can do this! It just takes a little digging into the Chrome settings.
So, say you want to be able to type “h javascript” to search your history for anything Javascript, simply go to your search engine settings (chrome://settings/searchEngines). Here, you can add History with “h” as the keyword and the following as the URL:
chrome://history/#q=%s
You can do the same for bookmarks with:
chrome://bookmarks/?#q=%s
Perfect. Now if only this were a more noticeable option, perhaps as a default setting; I’m sure other people would love this were it more obvious.