![\"add](\"/media/custom_search_engine.png\" "\\"Add")
I tried using DuckDuckGo for a couple days (privacy, unbiased results, control, blah blah blah), but I found myself preceding every search with !g. DuckDuckGo has these things called !Bangs, which are “shortcuts that quickly take you to search results on other sites”, according to their website. For example, if I want to search “dog” on Wikipedia, I can type !w dog in the search field at the top of my browser, and it will take me to the search result of dogs on wikipedia.
!Bangs were the only thing stopping me from switching back to Google search… But then I found out you can homebrew your own bangs with Google and I instantly switched back.
\nIn Google Chrome, go to settings (⌘ + ,), scroll down to Search Engine, and select Manage Search Engines.
\nIn the Other search engines section, you might see a bunch of random stuff. These are websites automatically adding them for you. Feel free to delete these so there’s no conflicts when you add your own. When you select Add, a modal will pop up:
\n
There’s 3 fields with sort of crappy names, but here’s what they mean:
\n!, but it can be whatever you want. I suggest picking a short-ish term that is related to the site you’re querying.%s with the term that you searched.Here’s an example for searching for subreddits on Reddit:
\n![\"add](\"/media/custom_search_example.png\" "\\"New")
To use this custom search, type the keyword into your browser search bar, hit space or tab, and then type your query.
\n![\"using](\"/media/custom_search.gif\" "\\"Using")
Here’s a list of the custom searches I currently have set up (along with the config):
\n| Search Engine | \nKeyword | \nURL | \n
|---|---|---|
| !sr | \nhttps://www.reddit.com/r/%s | \n|
| Google Drive | \n!drive | \nhttps://drive.google.com/drive/search?q=%s | \n
| Google Translate (to French) | \n!2fr | \nhttps://translate.google.com/#en/fr/%s | \n
| Netflix | \n!netflix | \nhttps://www.netflix.com/search?q=%s | \n
| YouTube | \n!yt | \nhttps://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=%s | \n
| Genius (Lyrics) | \n!genius | \nhttps://genius.com/search?q=%s | \n
| Thesaurus | \n!t | \nhttps://www.thesaurus.com/browse/%s | \n
| Google Maps | \n!m | \nhttps://www.google.com/maps/search/%s | \n
If you want more inspiration (or keyword suggestions), check out DuckDuckGo’s !Bangs page for a very, very long list of shortcuts they have set up.
","fields":{"slug":"custom-search-engines","tagSlugs":["/tag/productivity/"]},"frontmatter":{"date":"2019-07-05T03:45:00.000Z","description":"Sometimes we want our searches to be more specific than Google. Maybe we want to search something on wikipedia, netflix, or google translate. Maybe you think it takes one-too-many clicks to search for a site, go to it, and search from there. Here's the solution.","tags":["productivity"],"title":"custom search engine shortcuts"}}},"pageContext":{"isCreatedByStatefulCreatePages":false,"slug":"custom-search-engines"}}