One thing that sucks about leaving firefox is leaving the ‘awesome bar.’  Argue all you want, but no other location bar compares (nor does any web inspector compare to firebug, but that’s a topic for another day).

Google Chrome’s does have some great hidden potential through the search engine keyboard shortcuts though.  Click on the wrench, then Options, then click on the Manage button by the Default Search.

To try it out, select Yahoo! and click Edit.  Then, for keyboard shortcut, just enter a ‘y’. Do the same for Bing except use a ‘b’. Now exit your settings, and try the location bar (CTRL + L or CMD + L). Type ‘y’, a space, and your search query.  Hit enter and you’ll find your results on Yahoo!.

To take it a step further, add some search engines.  The first ones I did were “I’m Feeling Lucky” by Google, Amazon.com, and Denver Craigslist.  Another nice feature about chrome is that it automatically adds some search engine suggestions to the list according to where you’ve been.  If the engines exist in the ”Other Search Engines” section, just edit those and give them a keyboard shortcut. If not, here are the steps:

I’m Feeling Lucky: This takes you to Google’s first result.  Go to your search engine management again, click “Add”, then enter “I’m Feeling Lucky” for a name, a keyboard shortcut (I use “>”), and http://www.google.com/search?q=%s&btnI=Im+Feeling+Lucky as the URL.

Amazon: If it is in the “Other Search Engines” section, just set the keyboard shortcut for it.  Otherwise, enter “Amazon” for a name, choose a keyboard shortcut (“az” works for me), then enter http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Daps&field-keywords=%s&x=0&y=0 for the URL.

Denver Craigslist: Name: Denver Craigslist, Keyboard Shortcut: “cl”, URL: http://denver.craigslist.org/search/?areaID=13&subAreaID=&query=%s&catAbbreviation=sss  (Of course you can change denver.craigslist.org to suit your area).

Adding a new search engine that’s not in the list isn’t too difficult.  Just go to your site, perform a search that contains a single word (e.g. banana), copy the address out of the address bar, and replace that single search term (banana) with %s.

Simple example: Searching wordpress.org for banana give you this address bar: http://wordpress.org/search/banana .  So change banana out for %s and enter it into the URL field - http://wordpress.org/search/%s

More complicated example: searching wunderground for a city (e.g. denver). Going to wunderground.com and searching for “denver” yields an address of http://www.wunderground.com/cgi-bin/findweather/getForecast?query=denver&wuSelect=WEATHER  .  Replacing denver with %s gives you http://www.wunderground.com/cgi-bin/findweather/getForecast?query=%s&wuSelect=WEATHER  .  Now I can get Breckenridge’s weather by typing “wg 80424”. 

Note: firefox does have keyboard shortcuts for search engines, but they’re a bit clumsy and slow to get to.  For example, if I set my Yahoo! keyboard shortcut to y, I have to press ctrl + k to get to the search, then alt + down arrow, and finally ‘y’.  It will then keep the search engine set as Yahoo!.  A bit much for me, but I do love and miss the I’m Feeling Lucky default capability of Firefox’s location bar.