Chrome has had custom search engine keywords since day one (yes, I actually went to locate a day-one article on this feature[1]). Not sure why every time this topic comes up someone has to mention it as if it’s some sort of Firefox secret sauce, complete with weird replies like if you are “stuck on Chromium” you can emulate this with a pointless round trip to DuckDuckGo.

[1] https://searchengineland.com/searching-with-google-chrome-om...

> Not sure why every time this topic comes up someone has to mention it as if it’s some sort of Firefox secret sauce

If you're not sure I can clarify that for you. I was responding to someone talknig about ddg, and I was showing a better way of doing it. I didn't know that it's possible with Chrome because I don't use it.

In this case I can totally believe it’s innocuous. But as I said, it happens a lot. It happens on Firefox evangelism threads, Chrome bashing threads, DDG evangelism threads, Google bashing threads, etc. where a direct comparison is made. Imagine reading “hey C++ programmers, check out Rust, we have this amazing feature called zero cost abstractions!” over and over. Just really tiring.

Notice that we still have decent overlap: we both get annoyed when someone mentions ddg when doing it on the browser is obviously better :-)

Yeah, thank god some people still learn their tools. When I was younger I thought one of the defining characteristics of "techies" is that we open settings/preferences (followed by the advanced version) as soon as we get our hands on a piece of software. Unfortunately it seems the overall techie population is just getting lazier and lazier (not lazy in a good way), and now the norm is, or is sliding towards open the box -> whine about things not working out-of-box when the feature is right there -> find suboptimal workarounds on StackOverflow or random blogs posted by lazy people.

The fact that I like configuration is the reason that I ditched Chrome at home and moved from it to Firefox to Waterfox to Palemoon, where I can use Pentadactyl to customize far beyond the limits of any browser I'd used before.

At work I have to use Chrome (and worse, Chrome OS), and I used the settings to disable syncing between the devices I switch between (because I don't want Google to have any extra excuses to handle my data). Some of them I only use for an hour, so I optimize my customizations to be made quickly. I switch the default search engine to get thousands of keywords in seconds, then load AdNauseum for ads, then depending on how long and what I'll use the browser for, I'll get Surfingkeys or a similar extension for general vim-bindings (I've switched between more of these than I have fingers on one hand because they're all inferior to Pentadactyl in somewhat different ways) and wasavi for more extensive vi-like bindings in text fields.

Worth pointing out then that DDG has a number of shortcuts built-in. If you don't care about passing a query through them, it already works.

https://duckduckgo.com/bang

The most-used is probably !g, which sends your query to google. For wikipedia, it's !w.

> weird replies like if you are “stuck on Chromium”

My bad. I saw the parent and forgot I'd seen keywords on Chromium. To be fair, Chrome buries this deeper than Firefox, whose payment for pushing Google is presumably smaller (and IIRC has a few built in). It's enough of a hassle to set up that I personally used bangs (there are thousands of them already set up for you) when I was stuck on Chrome on a variety of unsynced devices daily at work before the nCov.

Agreed. I've had "en" as my keyword for Wikipedia searches on Chrome since 2008...

This, but also, when you're stuck on Chromium, change the default search to DuckDuckGo or Searx and use !w or !wp to search Wikipedia (and !s !sp if you want Google results for some reason, and !g or !go if you want Google results with a filter bubble).

Addendum: sorry to imply you can't also use keywords there, thanks to oefhra for reminding me you can https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23478553

yah, keywords are such a great but probably underutilized feature of firefox. i set up 'wiki' and a bunch of others when i started using firefox over a decade ago. i still use most today, although i've pointedly replaced google with duckduckgo ('g') long ago as well.

Once you get used to keyword searches, here are some other handy ones. It's like having a CLI to the Internet.

gm Google Maps

t thesaurus.com

u YouTube (for music)

pron for porn (after setting up a Google custom search engine that searches your favorite tube sites -- https://developers.google.com/custom-search)

gi for Google Images

r for Reddit (the site search has gotten better -- I used to use Google "site:reddit.com %s" instead).

My only problem with these is somehow the Wayback Machine doesn't work when I put https://web.archive.org/form-submit.jsp?url=%s.

In chrome you can type en.wikipedia.org and hit tab. For me it will autocomplete if you just type en.

The default is the whole domain (and it also works with other sites, like "amazon.com query"), but you can also change the keyword for it. For several years I've had "wp" as the keyword for wikipedia searches, and it works in both Firefox and Chrome. I just type "wp whatever my query is", no tab needed, and it will take me directly to the result.