Custom Search from the Chrome Omnibar

Google Chrome is quick­ly becom­ing my brows­er of choice.

One of the most pow­er­ful fea­tures is the Omin­bar, a sin­gle place to type URLs and search­es. I remem­ber the first time I saw the Google search field in Safari: It made me real­ize two things: first, how impor­tant Google was to every­thing I was doing, and sec­ond, how inno­v­a­tive Apple was. It was so much sim­pler to search from the brows­er itself instead of nav­i­gat­ing to Google, and then search­ing.

In Chrome (and also in Fire­fox, though I will cov­er that in a lat­er post), you can con­fig­ure your own set of brows­er search engines. In Chrome, you can run these cus­tom queries from the Omni­bar, with­out using a mouse.

Let’s say you do a lot of work mate­r­i­al at the Nation­al Archives, and you reg­u­lar­ly need to read up in the Archival Research Cat­a­logs. Instead of nav­i­gat­ing to the Archives site, and search­ing for your ARC entry, which might point you to arti­cles in NARA­tions or The Pro­logue about the ARC entry, and not the ARC entry itself, you can take your search and con­fig­ure your brows­er to per­form it.
Yes­ter­day, I looked at the Kore­an War-era Com­mand Reports, which are cov­ered in ARC 596349. The path to the ARC descrip­tion is at:

http://arcweb.archives.gov/arc/action/ExternalIdSearch?id=596354

To help you quick­ly get to this ARC entry, or any oth­er for which you know the num­ber:

1. In the Omin­bar, right click and click “Edit Search Engines.”
2. Click the plus but­ton to cre­ate a new search.
3. Name the search any­thing you would like.
4. Add a short, mem­o­rable key­word. I used “arc.”
5. Add as the URL the path, with the search term replaced by %s. In our exam­ple, this would look like: http://arcweb.archives.gov/arc/action/ExternalIdSearch?id=%s
6. Click OK.
7. Test it out. Go to the Omni­bar and type in your key­word fol­lowed by a tab and then a search term. In my exam­ple, this would be: arc [tab] 596354

Here’s anoth­er exam­ple. To search the Library of Con­gress’s Chron­i­cling Amer­i­ca News­pa­per project (pre­vi­ous posts: Chron­i­cling Amer­i­ca API and Chron­i­cling Amer­i­ca)on a statewide basis, to see what papers are avail­able, the search looks like:

http://chroniclingamerica.loc.gov/search/titles/results/?terms=nebraska

To make a cus­tom search for this in Chrome, right click in the Omni­bar, click “Edit Search Engines,” and then click the plus but­ton to cre­ate a new search. Name the search what you would like, add a mem­o­rable and brief key­word, and then enter the fol­low­ing as the URL:

http://chroniclingamerica.loc.gov/search/titles/results/?terms=%s

Now, when­ev­er you are work­ing on a new state, where you might want to take a look at some of the dig­i­tized news­pa­pers for arti­cles, ads, and obit­u­ar­ies, you can sim­ply type your key­word, a tab, and then the name of the state. In my exam­ple, this would be:

loc-news [tab] nebras­ka

This would take me to:

http://chroniclingamerica.loc.gov/search/titles/results/?terms=nebraska

Hap­py search­ing!