commands from URL bar?

Question

I love chrome and I notice that I often type "labrador lifespan" into my browser URL bar to ask google that particular question, "weather" (google searches "weather" and is smart, displays my local forecast), "0b101000101010 in decimal" (google searches "0b101000101010 " and is smart, displays a converter + the result for me) and for things like that it works.

Sometimes I do "google maps san diego kfc" when I want to see a map of KFC's in SD, CA or "google images ferrari" but this kind of command doesn't work, google goes to search the whole thing (searchquery="google images ferrari")

... IE, I use the browser URL bar like a command line except with extremely loose syntax.

Is there anything - another browser, chrome extension, firefox extension, plugin, anything - that can help me be more productive with my URL bar like that?

Answer 1

Have you seen Mozilla's Ubiquity? It lets you enter all sorts of commands into the address bar. Plus it allows anybody to add their own commands, and to share them.

Answer 2

For just searching, there is the QuickSearch for Chrome which allows you to choose where the search bar with search with (rather than just Google). You can choose YouTube, Bing, Amazon, Ebay, etc.

Also, there is the Firefox Ubiquity project which allows you to use many commands directly from the address bar. These are things like 'Wikipedia' 'word count' and 'weather'. There is a great screencast of that project here (YouTube link). This will likely be integrated into the next version of Firefox.

Lastly, Lifehacker has an article on some great Quicksearches for Firefox. These bookmarks let you start a command (say "googlemaps san diego kfc") and it would insert everything after googlemaps into a Google Maps search just like you mentioned in your question.

Answer 3

Chrome's settings window has a 'manage search engines' button, which allows you to manage the 'search engines' Chrome knows about. In the second column you can manage the prefixes you can use when typing in the 'omnibox', hints show up when you're typing displaying what Chrome will do, e.g. "Search somewebsite.com:" (more here)