Like Google but Better: The Chrome-Ask-Mefi link

November 17, 2013 5:32 PM

It may be that I am the last person to have figured this out, and if so, then I apologize, but I just discovered the lovely customized search engine feature of google chrome to automatically delve through askmefi troves for pearls of wisdom.
Basically, in Chrome's preferences pages, in the manage custom search engines area, I plugged in this URL: https://www.google.ca/#q=site:ask.metafilter.com+%s
and set up "ask" as the keyword.
Now, in the address bar, I can just type "ask", then Tab, and then whatever keyword, and I get a lovely list of the relevant askmefi pages (see here).
In so many cases, its better than Google!
posted by cacofonie to MetaFilter-Related at 5:32 PM (9 comments total)

So, how was the broccoli?
posted by unliteral at 6:14 PM on November 17, 2013 [3 favorites]

Having read this I just discovered that Duck Duck Go! will search the Green with the !amf prefix and the Blue with !mefi prefix. Thanks!
posted by alms at 6:53 PM on November 17, 2013

Good idea! To do this with Alfred, make sure you uncheck the default 'ask' search of Ask.com (lol), and then add a custom search for AskMe with the URL https://www.google.com/#q=site:ask.metafilter.com+{query} ... Then a search of AskMe is only a few keystrokes away, even if you don't have your browser in focus.
posted by Monsieur Caution at 6:53 PM on November 17, 2013

You can do the same in Firefox using a custom keyword search.
posted by Paragon at 7:28 PM on November 17, 2013 [2 favorites]

Neat! I had no idea you could do this.
posted by mathowie (staff) at 9:42 PM on November 17, 2013

Here are the URLs I use for some other services:

Wikipedia - keyword 'wp'
http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Special%3ASearch&search=%s&button=

Wiktionary - keyword 'wkt'
http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%s

Hoogle - keyword 'hgl'
(Okay, not that many people are learning Haskell, but who knows?)
http://www.haskell.org/hoogle/?hoogle=%s

When you type "wp cats" and go immediately to the wikipedia page for cats you can sometimes get that "whoa" reaction from people. It's fun.
posted by benito.strauss at 8:11 AM on November 18, 2013

thanks, I did not know you could do this, I feel like a hacker now. Tks also to benito.strauss
posted by skewed at 8:56 PM on November 18, 2013

Even easier is if you right click on the relevant search bar itself, there's an option to add it as a keyworded search engine (both chrome and firefox).

I do it for wikipedia, french wikipedia, amazon.co.uk, pubmed, and google scholar, but hadn't thought of askme.
posted by rollick at 5:59 AM on November 19, 2013

If you want to bring up a really quick QR code (it happens, honestly!), use:

http://chart.apis.google.com/chart?cht=qr&chs=300x300&chl=%s&chld=H|0

Set that to the keyword of your choice and the search string will magically become a QR code. To turn the link to whatever page you're currently on into one, it's easy in chrome to just "[ctrl+L][left arrow][keyword][space][enter]", all quick-like.

There's probably some fancier stuff you can use Google's Charts APIs with in this way. You can also use it for all sorts of RESTful interfaces, in which case your search string would be like "parameter/:other_param" or "parameter1=value1&parameter2=value2" or whatever the expected format is. It can be handy sometimes.
posted by jason_steakums at 9:38 AM on November 19, 2013