Search Box For Google Chrome

No doubt, chrome is a firefox killer, when it comes to speedily loading of web pages. Chrome seems to be the perfect light weight browser, but there are certain features available in firefox that i am so much used to, and i miss them in chrome. One such feature is the search bar in firefox, rather, the absence of search bar in chrome!

You can perform search in different ways in chrome-

• Tab to search- Type the address of website you want to search in address bar. You can search the website, if chrome has a record of site’s search engine. Press Tab to select the search engine, and you can type the keywords that you want to search for .

• Keyword search- This is the quickest way to search in chrome. Type the key words in address bar and hit Enter to see the search results from your default search engine.

• Right-click & search- Select some text in a webpage, right click and select the option to perform a search for selected text.

Firefox, IE and Safari have an address bar to type website url’s and a search bar, that facilitates search as per requirement, providing search results in the same tab. In google chrome, developers combined the address bar and search bar. Although, you can add as many search engines to the settings in chrome, but, this way one is restricted to use the search engine that is default to the browser, and the settings have to be changed every time to perform search on desired search engine, unlike firefox, where you can easily change the search engine by simply selecting the right one from drop down menu attached to search bar.

Suppose, i want to perform an image search. I will select my flickr search engine and type the desired keywords in search bar. Hitting Enter will give the desired results!

Search Box

To address the above problem, an extension is available. The extension is aptly named Search Box. Like other extensions in chrome, it is an out of the box extension in form of an icon, which when clicked, provides you with a search bar, where you can type the desired key words and perform search.

You are allowed to add custom search engines from the options field of the extension. Select the search engine you want to search with, input keywords, press Enter and results will appear in new tab.

I personally find the extension a great replacement to search bar in safari, IE and firefox. And this gives me another reason to leave firefox and shift to Chrome!

What are your views on it ?

Link: Chrome Search Box