Thread by @QiaochuYuan

i love chrome custom search engines and i want you guys to love them too. below is a quick custom search engine tutorial and then some examples of custom search engines that i use a lot

currently you find custom search engines by going to settings -> search engines -> manage search engines. then you can add custom ones by writing down appropriate keywords and URLs, which will usually end in something like "?q=%s"; the %s is the search term

then you type the keyword into the URL bar and then type the search term. like this:

1. custom twitter searches - "tw" searches all of twitter, "tq" searches my own tweets, "tvv" searches @visakanv's tweets, "tmo" searches @Malcolm_Ocean's tweets. this is a key part of my QT game b/c it minimizes the # of keypresses to find a tweet

"twf" searches tweets from everyone i follow (that's "&pf=on"), for when i want to find a tweet but can't remember who wrote it

"tm" searches my mentions (by searching for tweets addressed to me but not written by me), for when i want to check replies from people i don't follow. this is also a version of the mentions tab that strips out likes which should just exist already smh

2. "et" searches etymonline.com for the etymology of a word. really nice for when i'm just having idle thoughts about the etymology of a word, again saves keypresses

3. lol i actually completely forgot i had this one but "lib" searches library genesis. nice

4. "yt" searches youtube. i don't know how to describe how much more accessible this made the mental motion "i wonder if i can find a youtube video about..."

5. "oeis" searches the online encyclopedia of integer sequences. this is only useful when i'm doing a specific kind of math and at no other time but it's really nice and simple to have around. i have a few other math searches, for wolframalpha, stackexchange, and my blog