I just finished the whole upgrade to Windows 7 shebang and started the painful process of getting my bookmarks sorted (thanks xmarks!) and then working on my keyword searches. Fortunately in Firefox they were imported with xmarks since it stores the keyword data in the bookmarks folder. Chrome did something new though.

If you’re using the release version which should be 5.something they’ve basically automated keyword bookmark entries. This is great since you usually have to find the search URL and add that info into the bookmark. However now all you have to do is browse to whatever sites you normally go to, then right click the address bar and go to Edit Search Engines… From there the defaults are on top but below it will populate a list of all sites you’ve gone to with search boxes. If you edit them you can customize the keyword from the default website.com generic keyword to excellent abbreviations.

For example, I change youtube.com to yt. Now when I hit control+L and then type “yt something” and hit enter it will search youtube for the word something. Obviously change “something” to whatever you’re searching for.

You can see what I was talking about in the edit box where the third line says URL:. You used to have to fish around for that and then paste it in there which sucked, but now Chrome has become totally badass!

My choice of keywords

yt: youtube
w: wikipedia
az: amazon

I stick to two letter abbreviations but for imdb I use imdb. I have a lot of esoteric searches I use which follow the same convention. Anyway, browsing becomes a lot speedier (and more command line feely) when you get used to the speed of keyword searching. Very tough to watch people go to a site, click on the search bar (if the site doesn’t automatically go to it) and start typing away.