Toggle between search engines in Google Chrome

How can I easily toggle between DuckDuckGo and Google in the omnibox?

Is there a way to achieve it? Any plugins, shortcuts or so? The problem narrows down to changing the default search engine of Google Chrome using a shortcut.

The point is that Google is far better for non-English searches and technical information while DuckDuckGo provides the awesome bangs! feature. It would be great if I could easily switch between them whenever I need.

Clarification

When I use DuckDuckGo I can easily switch to Google by appending !g to my query. What I want is to be able to easily switch to Google, search multiple times without appending !g every time and then switch back to DDG.

Also, I use !s pretty often to switch to StartPage as they seem to aggregate results from Google.

4 Answers

One way you can quickly toggle to a different search engine is by editing the Keyword for it in your list. With this approach you don't need to change your default search engine.

1. Right click on your Omnibar and click Edit search engines...

2. Look for the DuckDuckGo entry and select it

3. The middle column enter a short and memorable keyword, like du for instance

4. Click Done to close the modal window

In the Omnibar, you can now just type du + Space on your keyboard to toggle DuckDuckGo. Then, just type a search term and off you go.

Here's how it looks in action

If DuckDuckGo does not exist in your list of search engines, you can easily add it.

1. Right click on your Omnibar and click Edit search engines...

2. Scroll to the bottom of the Other search engines section and look for Add a new search engine

3. Enter DuckDuckGo for the search engine name, du (or other) for the keyword, and for the URL

4. Click Done to close the modal window

there are extensions. One particular is called 'search centre' you literally click on the toolbar, type your query and select which search engine you are using [you have to go and find the ones you want for instance I set imdb as one by going to imdb and right clicking the search box and selecting 'add to search centre']

I wish there was one where it just added a little drop box to the omnibox so you could type your query then choose which engine to use. you can do that in firefox but chrome doesn't seem to have it..

I hope this helps but I know it's not quite what you wanted but it's better than having to mess around with keywords and stuff every time.

I hope this won't be too late and would be a little helpful to you.

Big Search (Github repo) is an extension for Chrome+Firefox to do multiple search.

• To switch a search engine: Select the search box text. Then use selected text (single-line or multi-line) as search term via context menu

  • On Chrome, after clicking context menu item, click the icon on toolbar (or use keyboard shortcut) (sorry this may be a little tricky for your "toggle between search engines", because of a defect of Chrome currently. No such tricky on Firefox, popup automatically show)

  • Or, just do continuous search by clicking multiple buttons on popup, then multiple search result tabs are open.
• Besides using context menu, keyboard shortcuts for 1. Open popup. 2. Set selected text as search term (then use open popup).

I was in search for the same thing, but couldn't find something as easy as I wanted, so I just developed an easy bookmark hack to do this!

First, just create a bookmark in your bookmarks bar, then edit the URL of the bookmark, and put in the following code, which will automatically translate any Duck Duck Go search into a Google search (you can change the name of the bookmark to anything you want):

javascript:location.href=""+location.search

Whenever you want to change a Duck Duck Go search into a Google search, just click the bookmark. The same can be done for other search engines as well, such as Yahoo, Brave, etc., just by changing the URL part of the link.

For example, if you want to change a Google search into a Duck Duck Go search, just use another bookmark with this link:

javascript:location.href=""+location.search

If you want to switch to Brave search, just paste this into a bookmark:

javascript:location.href=""+location.search

For Yahoo:

javascript:location.href=""+location.search

For Bing use:

javascript:location.href=""+location.search

To keep my bookmark bar tidy, I just named each of the bookmarks as a single letter (B for Brave, G for Google, M for Microsoft Bing, etc.). Hope all this is helpful to someone! Cheers!