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I'm not sure if this is possible, but I want to type in foo, hit enter, and be directed to bar.com.

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  • Here's an example of setting up URL shortcuts in Chrome/Firefox - medium.com/requestly-docs/… using Requestly
    – Sachin Jain
    Aug 11, 2019 at 10:11
  • Is it possible for these shortcuts to be "managed"? For "managed" I meant in a LAN environment, all users can use the same shortcut by default. And, if the target website is moved, the admin can just redefine the shortcut to reflect the change. i.e. Won't need everyone on the LAN to change their shortcut definitions. Another example would be to add a new shortcut (for all user on the LAN, not just one user).
    – Robin Hsu
    Feb 20 at 8:22

4 Answers 4

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You can achieve that by taking advantage of the Custom search engines feature in Google Chrome to create simple URL shortcuts. Even though it should be used to create shortcuts for custom search engines, you can use it to create shortcuts to any URL.

  1. Right-click the address bar in Google Chrome and click Edit search engines... (or type chrome://settings/searchEngines in the address bar).

  2. In the Other search engines table, scroll down, and click the Add a new search engine empty box.

    • In the Add a new search engine box, type the name of the shortcut (i.e bar).
    • In the Keyword box, type the shortcut keyword (i.e foo).
    • In the URL with %s in place of query box, type the URL of the website (i.e http://bar.com).

Then, if you type the keyword foo in the address bar, a suggestion named bar will pop up, and by clicking Enter, you will be redirected to http://bar.com.

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  • 11
    The %s parameter is very useful for webtools you use often. Example, set the keyword to ru (reddit user) and url to https://reddit.com/u/%s. Then to quickly expand to https://redditcom/u/fred, just type this in the address bar: ru fred
    – Donn Lee
    Apr 18, 2018 at 19:32
  • I was searching for this "built-in" solution for several years. Thanks @amiregelz! ... For others, you might also start using Autohotkey and have a key combination opening your most used websites.
    – Avatar
    Apr 17, 2020 at 8:51
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We were somewhat inspired by this post and built something like this in eesel

You can make "Commands" for any app which are like a shortcut to a URL. Think /github issue new <labels> <title> or /github pull request new and so on.

We took things a step further and let you configure and inject JavaScript on the page that's opened, so you can build more advanced workflows. Think /google calendar join next which goes to your calendar, clicks on your current event and joins it.

We covered it in a quick video here.

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You can use Requestly chrome+firefox extension to setup URL shortcuts.

Follow these steps:

  1. Install Requestly.
  2. Create a new Redirect Rule.

  3. Define Source & Destination as

    Request Url -> Contains -> https://www.google.com/search?q=foo&
Destination -> https://bar.com

Here is a screenshot setting up the rule:

screenshot

You can also use Regex to redirect only on certain type of value that matches the regex. This answer written by founder of Requestly explains how you can use regex to redirect based on Regex Matches.

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I found the gui solution to be inadequate,too many steps. It defeats the original purpose, which is to have a shortcut...I used a windows batch script and then created a shortcut on my desktop to the batch file...Probably you can do the same using linux batch, though the location of the executable will be different. If you add the path of the chrome executable to your system variables you won't need the first two lines.

C:&

cd Program Files (x86)\Google\Chrome\Application&

chrome "http://yoururl/"

Its useful if your development environment requires you to use chrome but you prefer to do all your research in Firefox

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