You Ought To Know This Little Secret Within Google Chrome Omnibox

Google Chrome – the World's widely used browser has a tiny little secret.

Searching using the Omnibox – 

which is searching using address bar is the same as searching directly on Google.com. However, if you are not a Google searcher by default, then you might be searching using AOL, Yahoo or Bing – within Google Chrome.




In Internet Explorer you attain this by changing your default search provided in the Settings. Google Chrome too allows to change your default Search Engine settings on their Settings page.

Better still, Google knows that already and has made it even simpler for you - that's exactly the little secret I was talking about. Here's how:

How to search Yahoo, Bing, AOL, YouTube or Ask in Google Chrome:

In Google Chrome if you want to search using Bing, Yahoo, but still don't want to change your default search provider, all you have to do is just this.

To search using AOL search engine within Google Chrome, just prefix the letter 'a' before you type your search text in the Google Chrome's Omnibox. This also applies for searching in Ask.

To search using Bing search engine within Google Chrome, just prefix the letter 'b' before you type your search text in the Google Chrome's Omnibox.

To search using Yahoo search engine within Google Chrome, just prefix the letter 'y' before you type your search text in the Google Chrome's Omnibox. This also applies for searching in YouTube.

Related: Search using the address bar.






Additionally, after you try the above tricks, if you'd watched closely, you would have noticed that when you prefix 'a' to search using AOL, Google not only provides AOL as one of the suggestions in their Google Autocomplete feature – but also provides options to search websites from your web browser history.

For example in my screenshot above you will notice Autocomplete suggestion to search my text within Automattic website too.

Did you like this Google Chrome Omnibox trick?

If you know of any other Google Chrome secret trick, please write them in your comments below:

--------------------------------------------

Written by +Arun Sarathy