Re:Breaking down Amazon's mega dropdown
by enraged_camel on Wednesday March 06, 2013 @09:26PM
(#5335619)
I disagree completely. The fact that Amazon does not auto-focus to the search box annoys me greatly, since 99% of the time I find the items I'm looking for via search. Compared to Google, Youtube, etc. Amazon feels clunky.
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Re:Breaking down Amazon's mega dropdown
by nowarninglabel on Wednesday March 06, 2013 @10:42PM
(#5335928)
Then why don't you just search via Google? "site:amazon.com bank of bob" or even most of the time you can just add the word amazon to your search query "amazon bank of bob" and I get exactly what I'm searching for.
To me you haven't made any case at all why others should have to suffer so you can have auto-focus on Amazon when your needs are already met elsewhere.
Things like this are why I have DuckDuckGo as my browser's default search engine.
"!amazon thingamabob" (or just "!a thingamabob").
Way more convenient than going to the homepage and worrying about search auto-focus.
Re:Breaking down Amazon's mega dropdown
by jamesjporter on Thursday March 07, 2013 @12:48AM
(#5336335)
My favorite thing about DDG is that at this point there are so many bang syntaxes defined that if I don't know the syntax for something, I can often just guess and half the time I get it right!
Re:Breaking down Amazon's mega dropdown
by mixmastamyk on Thursday March 07, 2013 @01:10AM
(#5336394)
Firefox keyword search is more direct, though you have to define them yourself. See my comment above.
Re:Breaking down Amazon's mega dropdown
by mixmastamyk on Thursday March 07, 2013 @01:07AM
(#5336386)
Try keyword search on Firefox:
"a foo" to search on amazon, "g foo" google, "i foo" imdb, "m foo" google maps, "w foo" wikipedia, "u foo" urbandictionary, etc... I have more but they are not public sites.
Chrome automatically recognizes searches on sites, so that you can just type "ama[TAB]" in de URL bar, and it will give you a site-specific search straight in the URL bar (provided that "ama" auto-completes to "amazon.com" for you, naturally). This works for basically every site you've ever visited that has search functionality. It's pretty decent.
Re:Breaking down Amazon's mega dropdown
by mixmastamyk on Thursday March 07, 2013 @03:09PM
(#5339853)
That's interesting, though I only care about a few sites, and prefer the brevity of the ff keywords.
Sounds like the two could complement each other, like aliases and completion in a shell.
You can rename the search engine abbreviations as you like.
I have "w" for wikipedia, "y" for youtube, "gm" for google maps, etc...
This is THE feature of Chrome that I use constantly every day. It saves 5-10 seconds on each search you do every day. It adds up.