How-to: Turn the Chrome Omnibox into a Feeling Lucky Box

“I’m Feeling Lucky” is one of the most underused Google Search services in existence. For those who don’t know, I’m Feeling Lucky simply redirects you to the first search result for whatever you enter. For example, if you go to google.com, type in Good Morning Geek, and hit “I’m Feeling Lucky,” it will bring you straight to goodmorninggeek.com. If you type in “Llamas Wikipedia” and hit “I’m Feeling Lucky,” it will bring you straight to the wikipedia page for Llamas. This is convenient because it usually gets you where you want to go without the need to have the search page middleman.

In Google Chrome, the top bar serves as a URL bar and a search bar – referred to as the “OmniBox.” Typically, you can enter any google search into that bar and it will take you to the search page. Here’s how to turn it into an “I’m Feeling Lucky” box, so that if you type Good Morning Geek into the bar, it will take you straight to GMG!

1. Go into Chrome’s Preferences and click “Manage Search Engines.”

2. Scroll to the bottom and click “Add New.” In the first field, type “lucky”, in the second field type “lucky”, and in the third field copy and paste (without the quotes) “http://www.google.com/search?q=%s&btnI”, then hit okay.

3. Open “Manage Search Engines…” again and find the lucky search engine that you just made. Hover over it and click the box on the right that says “Make default.”

4. Hit Ok at the bottom, and enjoy! Try it out: type “ostrich wikipedia” in the search bar and hit enter, and marvel at how it magically redirects you!

If there isn’t a result with enough in common to be sure, Google will just redirect you to the search page.

If you want to do just a normal google search, just type in “google” then press tab, and enter your search.

Enjoy!

Where’s realtime search?!

If you do a Google search for a topic that is fairly popular on twitter, you will usually see something that looks a bit like this:

And the list of tweets will update in realtime.

Also, you would find a “Realtime” in the left sidebar.

Oddly, that’s all gone! You will no longer see anything in real time, and the realtime search is gone from the left sidebar.

There’s a ocuple of theories that could be cause for this. First off, it could be that google is planning on integrating Google+ into their realtime search – but that wouldn’t mean they’d need to remove it.

The other possible reason is that google is trying to back off from twitter, considering that they now have a competition going – but until Google+ is fully available, they shouldn’t have any reason to want to hold grudges.

Realtime search may be back sometime in the future, but with Google now as a social service, Realtime Search may never be quite the same.

 

Search Google – now with your Voice

Google's Voice Search integrated into the web

Since its debut in 1997, Google Search in general has grown in size and strength.

Since then, the keyboard and mouse have always been a primary tool in searches.

In 2008, the Google Mobile App was released to the Android and iOS operating systems, allowing native and mobile searching of the web.

A few months later, they integrated a new feature that they had been working on into the mobile apps called Voice Search. Voice search was a new idea on how to revolutionize searching. But most Google searches were done on the computer, so even if everyone used voice search on their phones, more requests would be made from a keyboard.

Google took a surprising 2½ years to make their next move. Then about a month ago, they released Voice Search online, using the same microphone input as Gmail chat. However, they confined it the Chrome as an experimental search feature.

I think that Google really has enough “innovations” that they’ve given to us and that using a keyboard is just fine for searches. Personally, I talk faster than I type, but I am so used to typing that a switch to talking instead is actually harder, at least for a while. I see where they are going with the user-friendly ideas, but this is one of their kind of unnecessary ones. The recognition accuracy is ok, but as I expected it doesn’t work well with names, even of well-known people.

If you want to try it out, head on over here in Google Chrome and hit Try It Out.

Alfred

A wonderful little app with the worst name they could come up with.

Alfred is a Spotlight Alternative. It is similar to quicksilver, but is quite a bit simpler.

Basically, it is a plain text box that opens on a key command. you can type to search through your hard drive, but if there are no files then you can choose to search through google, wikipedia, or even amazon.

In addition to searching your hard drive alfred can search numerous things.

For example, you can type “lucky doorknob” an it will open the first google result for a search of doorknob.

You can also do things like type in a URL and it will open in your web browser. In the screenshots is a list of some of the functions included with the app. You can also create your own which comes in handy if your favorite search engine doesn’t come with Alfred by default.

Now although those functions are useful, it prevails over spotlight mostly because if it’s speed. Everything happens faster for some reason, but let me just say, I like it.

Alfred is free and highly customizable when it comes to interface. Download it from alfredapp.com.

Screenshots:

Quicksilver

Pre Script:Quicksilver is not to complicated but easy to use. also, in the screenshots of this page wallsaver is not enabled because it sucks up 2 things-

Battery life and RAM.
Spotlight is a very convenient tool. only with key commands, you can search applications, files, folders, web history, and much more. But some things you can’t do, like type in urls, or run scripts, or execute large text. Quicksilver is
pretty much a spolight, but you can execute urls. for example, here is typing in google.

To get to this text entry tool, just press the period key. it will look like this. this is after I had done the search for Financing. It automatically selects what ever you had come in the results of whatever you had typed in before pressing the period key.
Then you can do things like Large Type, and URLs. To open any item, just hit enter. it will do whatever the action is that is to the right to whatever is on the left. After Pressing the period key, I typed some stuff in. Here I typed in Apple is awesome!  and as you can see on the right it said Large Type (if all you see after Apple is awesome! is a square, it is actually an apple logo. if it is a square, you obviously have a PC).
Once you hit enter and execute it, the text will appear huge ( in this case “Large”, as Quicksilver says) accross you screen in white text. you can then hit the enter key or hit the escape key to exit large type.

Then when you hit enter, it will execute the Large Type. Once executed, it will do exactly that- Make it really big over your screen.
Plugins can also be used to do other things with quicksilver.
If you find to be using quicksilver more often than spotlight but find that you are used to the spotlight command-space, you can go into the spotlight preferences and disable the key command, then go into the quicksilver preferences and configure it to have the same key command.