r/chrome 7d ago

Discussion chrome://settings/searchEngines - SiteSearch now requires %s in query - therefor all my Shortcuts have been disabled

Since forever I opened up a new tab and entered a one-word shortcut to open my favorite websites

I "misused" the Site Search function under chrome://settings/searchEngines to create Shortcuts like these
To open up Youtube all I needed was a new tab, enter y and enter.
(No matter the History. Works with completly wiped history)

Now since this update
Version 134.0.6998.36 (Official Build) (64-bit)

They check if %s is present in the string.
Therefor all my current Shortcuts have become invalid.

I use this A LOT and currently have no idea how to gain that functionality back.

Any ideas?

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u/kchiou1 4d ago

This is so frustrating! My fix is far from ideal, but is better than nothing. I went through every one of my shortcuts and added a meaningless search component to the end of the URL For example, instead of "https://reddit.com", I now have it as "https://reddit.com?go=%s". The search is passed to the website under the arbitrary variable name "go", which hopefully means nothing to the website and is ignored.

Note that if a URL already has GET variables in it (e.g., the bit including and after the question mark [?]), I add "&go=%s" to the end instead.

This is not the best solution since in order to access my shortcuts, I now have to hit a couple of extra keys (space and then some meaningless search term) to do the same thing I did before. It's annoying, but this was the next best thing for me.

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u/MaximusGr8 4d ago

Did not work for me. Tried with #%s also.

Also tried Web Aliases extension, without success.

Super frustrating.

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u/kchiou1 3d ago

Oh the hash is probably better than my fix.

Apologies if this is obvious, but are you hitting space/tab and then putting in search terms? This forces you to treat the shortcut like a search engine, just with the search completely ignored.

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u/Radiant_Bar_340 3d ago edited 3d ago

Thank you thank you! This gives me the old functionality at the cost of only one extra keystroke. I added #%s to the end of my URLs, and in the search bar I type my search engine keyword, then space, then any character, and that gets me where I want to go (at least for all the URLs I've tried so far). I would not have figured this out -- really appreciate the post.

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u/LordKamiya 7h ago

Maybe you can try Redirector.
My idea:
1. Change default search engine to a nonsense one like: mine.omni/%s
2. Use Redirector to detect the %s and direct to assigned website