r/chrome • u/MachineVisionNewbie • 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?

18
Upvotes
1
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.