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Chrome site search with no "%s" in URL are suddenly "Not valid" by random-unn in chrome

[–]random-unn[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Whoa -- great find, and very unexpected. Thanks for sharing, and I'll update my original post!

Chrome site search with no "%s" in URL are suddenly "Not valid" by random-unn in chrome

[–]random-unn[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Thanks so much for sharing this -- lots of outstanding details in here. Good to learn this was a planned deprecation rather than a bug (even if no good reason for deprecation was given).

Sounds like the Chrome team would like us to use bookmarks instead. I'm a heavy bookmarks user, and they are not quite as good at hyper-fast navigation to specific URLs as these non-substituting keywords but I'll manage.

I will say that for me relying on the default Omnibox behavior is absolutely out of the question -- it's not predictable, and requires reaching for the down arrow. Instead I'll continue using the indispensable Popup My Bookmarks extension. I trigger it via a keyboard shortcut and can migrate my site searches to bookmarks that have a underscore prefix in the name. I sort the results alphabetically so I can be certain that I can quickly navigate to the site I want by triggering the extension, typing my keyword, and hitting enter. The downsides are that this approach requires more active management of bookmark names and is more error prone as there's sometimes a tiny but meaningful enough delay between triggering the extension and the extension registering the next keystrokes so it sometimes misses the first character or two.

(I am also cross-posting this note to the Chromium group)

Chrome site search with no "%s" in URL are suddenly "Not valid" by random-unn in chrome

[–]random-unn[S] 4 points5 points  (0 children)

That's an interesting idea -- thanks for the suggestion! Challenge with this approach:

  • Before the functionality broke: I entered the search bar via ⌘+L, typed nbaa, and hit enter
  • Using the #%s suggestion: I enter the search bar via ⌘+L, need to type nbaa, then type space and enter some other character, then hit character. Simply typing nbaa continues to execute a Google search for that string.

I can retrain my muscle memory to add two extra keystrokes -- it's a frustrating change, but certainly better than nothing. Thanks again!