Custom searches
Searching For Eve Information From the Chrome Omnibox (Address Bar)
Despite being clearly stated in a sub topic hidden behind a + of an obscure help topic many people do not that can set up the search bar in Chrome to search nealy any site.
Setup
Setting up custom search is incredibly easy if you have a nice table like the one below.
- Right Click on the Chrome Omnibox (Address bar) and select "Edit search engines..."
- The Chrome settings page will open with a "Search engines" Box with two sections: "Default search settings" and "Other search engines" (more on this in the "Advanced Section".
- Scroll all the way to the bottom of this box until you see three text entry boxes with greyed text in them.
- Enter the information from the table below in order from left to right.
- Name :E-Uni
- Keyword :e-uni
- Search URL :http://wiki.eveuniversity.org/w/Special:Search?search=%s
- Hit the "Done" Button
- Repeat for any additional search engines.
So to set up to search this wiki you would enter into the three boxes: "E-Uni", "e-uni" and "http://wiki.eveuniversity.org/w/Special:Search?search=%s" (without quotes)
Now you are ready to try it out.
Searching
- Type the keyword (i.e. e-uni) into the Omnibox and hit "Tab".
- Then type what you want to search for (i.e. Noctis) and hit "Enter".
The Table
Website | Name | Keyword | Search URL |
E-Uni Wiki | E-Uni | e-uni | http://wiki.eveuniversity.org/w/Special:Search?search=%s |
EVELopedia | EVELopedia | evewiki | wiki.eveonline.com/en/wiki/Special:Search?search=%s |
EVE Central | Eve Central | evecen | http://eve-central.com/home/typesearch.html?search=%s |
Ellatha | Ellatha | WH | http://eve-central.com/home/typesearch.html?search=%s |
Staticmapper | Staticmapper | staticm | http://www.staticmapper.com/index.php?system=%s |
Advanced
Now for an explanation of the information you have been blindly entering.
The first two boxes are fairly simple.
- Name is basicly a tool tip aside from possibly shortening very long names should be the name of the web site. (Google likes to use base urls such as ask.com here we did not)
- Keyword is the text that after hitting tab triggers the search field. Brevity and uniqueness are the watchwords here. (Again Google like to use base URLs such as ask.com we strongly recomend against that to limet confusion.)
The Search URL entry on the other hand is the black magic you are probably reading this section to learn. The short answer is that it is the search URL with %s in place of the terms. For some websites finding the search url is very easy. Many search engines have the search term as the last part of the URL. A serch on the frount page of [google.com] for "Eve" produces a web page who's url that looks like this: "https://www.google.com/#q=Eve" to make a Search URL you just replace the word "Eve" with "%s": "https://www.google.com/#q=%s" Some times the search term appears in the middle of the url and sometimes it appears twice. An example would be searching [bing.com] it provides this mouthful: "http://www.bing.com/search?q=Eve&go=&qs=n&form=QBLH&pq=Eve&sc=8-3&sp=-1&sk=&cvid=889e37567545c9ac3d50345324187e71" you could faithfully reproduce that entier string replacing both instances of "Eve" with %s. However a quick test of deleting every thing after the first instance will show that "http://www.bing.com/search?q=%s" will work just as well (probubly better since that hex string is likely settings that change each time and the example is actually the result of keyboard mashing).
Wiki's can be annoying, depending on the template used. If they have a topic for your search you will be directed directly there and will not see the search URL. EVEolpedia and this wiki will both do that for the word "Eve". However the words "Test potato" will provide the urls that were shortened for the table above.
If you looked at the "Other search engines" section you may have seen some of these sites already listed, probably with their base url for their Name and Keyword. Chrome will auto add websites you use to this list sometimes. If it does simply clicking on it will let you change the Name and Keyword to something less cumbersome or let you copy the Search URL so you can add it to the table here.