Web Browser Keywords

You find yourself visiting the same basic set of web pages every day. Your favorite news pages, your favorite weather report page, your favorite translation service, Wikipedia, and your preferred web search page.

Every time you're doing something frequently, you should think of optimization.

Since opening a web page and optionally typing in a search phrase does not seem to be something which can be optimized any further, I'm going to convince you of the opposite.

The usual process of opening a web page is:

1. Open a new tab (or window) in your browser
2. Either type its URL in the address bar or you select its bookmark from your bookmark collection
3. If you also want to search for something:
   1. After the web page has loaded, you're clicking in a search box
   2. You enter a search phrase
   3. If you're not used to having an easy life (by pressing Enter), you then use your mouse to click on the search button.

Voilà, the web page content enlightens your mind. Hopefully.

When I want to search for a query string in my preferred search engine, the process looks like that:

1. I open a new tab by pressing Ctrl-t
2. I type, e.g., s How to live a great life and press Enter

That's it, because I associated s to my search engine.

When I just want to open a page from my bookmarks, it's very similar:

1. I open a new tab by pressing Ctrl-t
2. I type, e.g., k and press Enter

In this case, my homepage opens up which is saved as a bookmark with the keyword k.

I do use a certain set of keywords in all of my browsers. Some examples are listed below:

You'll find similar keywords handy for your daily routine, I'm sure.

For customized search box, it is easily done: secondary mouse on the search box: Add a Keyword for this Search ... and define a short and easy to remember keyword.

For normal web pages (no search box), you have to manually add a keyword to a bookmarked page:

1. You define a bookmark
   • By clicking on the star icon
2. Select Show your Bookmarks
   • The button next to the star or simply press Ctrl-Shift-o
3. Search your new bookmark
   • When you've got lots of bookmarks, you're better up by selecting the folder Recently Bookmarked
4. Click on it
   • In the bottom of the window, you can see Name, Location, and Tags
5. Click on More (at the bottom)
6. Enter a short and easy to remember keyword in the Keyword field
7. You can close the window now and start using your keyword

Bookmarks in Chrome do not provide a keyword feature. However, the feature of custom search engines does.

Locate your search box and then press secondary mouse: Add as search engine ... and enter the keyword.

For normal pages without any search box

1. Press the secondary mouse on the address field
2. Then you select Edit search engines ...
3. Scroll to the bottom of the window
4. Enter your chosen name of the page, a short keyword (second column), and its URL in the last column
5. After clicking on Done, you're all set

That's it.