Today I want to talk about what is possibly the most underrated feature in web browsers today: The Site Search feature. Now, this feature isn’t unique to Brave (the browser seen in images below), it is available on all Chromium based browsers (Brave, Chrome, Edge).
Note: There is a similar feature available on Firefox, however it is limited to preset sites — you cannot create your own custom site searches.
What is Site Search?
At it’s core, Site Search is a feature that allows you to quickly and easily insert text from the address bar into a URL. While this might not sound too useful on the face of things, what this essentially allows you to do is create a custom search shortcut for any website that uses Query strings.
This allows anyone to increase their productivity by setting up a custom Site Search to skip directly to a page or predefined search rather than jumbling through a website’s GUI to get there.
Examples of the default Site Search shortcuts included with every Brave installation.
Getting Started
To create your own Site Search, follow these simple steps.
Go to the Settings page (or type brave://settings/ for Brave, chrome://settings/ for Chrome)
Click on Search Engine
Click on Manage search engines and site search (or type brave://settings/searchEngines for Brave, chrome://settings/searchEngines for Chrome)
Scroll down to where it says Site search and click Add.
There will then be 3 prompts for you to input for your new custom search.
Search Engine
This will be the name of your prompt. It will be displayed after using the shortcut in the address bar.
Shortcut
The key sequence to activate the shortcut, followed by a tab. For example, using :ex as the shortcut value, by typing :ex in the address bar and pressing the tab key, you will have activated the Site Search function for your custom search. Any additional text after will be used for %s in the below field.
URL with %s in place of query
This will be your URL string, with %s being used in place of your search query. See below examples for more detail.
And this is all it takes to setup a new Site Search.
Examples
How exactly to best use Site Search really boils to what kind of work you do on a daily basis, but understanding the concept of time saving and efficiency it provides may help spark an idea of what best works for you. Here are some basic examples for popular websites.
Perform a Confluence search ONLY for a specific space. NOTE: Your space name is listed in the URL when visiting a space homepage (similar to https://<domain>.com/display/SPACE )
Using myself as an example, I work in the IT field at a sizeable corporation. A large portion of my day to day work is spent using Confluence, Jira, and ServiceNow.
Obviously this isn’t a complete list (the full list is much larger), but those sites make up at least 40% of the browser activity in my day to day work. Often I find myself in situations where people provide numbers for incidents, changes, releases, tasks, requests and more, but no links — that’s where Site Search comes in. Rather than loading up a site, searching for the item, loading a list of related items, then clicking into it to finally bring it up, I can use a shortcut to paste in the unlinked item and instantly pull it up (or have it displayed so it’s just one click away).
The Site Search feature is a Quality of Life improvement for all workers.
Regardless of what type industry or field you may work in, I think it’s fair to say that for the majority of office workers, almost all of their day to day work is done on a handful of websites. The sites themselves will vary from one individual to another, but the commonality is that there’s always going to be some number of sites we utilize the most. Site Search allows us to maximize our efficiency of those sites and cut down on time spent clicking and waiting. If you haven’t yet checked it out, I highly recommend you start using the Site Search feature today.
