Last year shortly after Chrome was released I posted a quick tip on how to make a Delicious “plugin” for Chrome. This was a neccessity, as at that writing Chrome didn’t have a method to migrate the awesome Delicious-Firefox plugin. Well, it’s about 10 months later, and still no plugin support — though some exciting stuff seems just around the corner.

The downside to the bookmarklet method in our last tip is that it doesn’t offer a quick way to search all your bookmarks – tagging and adding bookmarks is essential, but finding them again is sort of the hallmark of a good bookmarking methadology, no?

Thanks to Tip Trick Mod reader MacAnthony here’s an interm solution for quickly searching Delicious bookmarks in Chrome.

1. In Chrome, right-click the browser’s address bar and select “Edit search engines…” (see right)
2. Click the “Add” button and fill in the three fields:
   • Name: ie. Delicious — this is just for organizational purposes.
   • Keyword: ie. delicious — this is the trigger that you’ll type in your address bar to tell Chrome to search your Delicious bookmarks.
   • URL: This should be http://delicious.com/search?context=userposts|your_delicious_username&p=%s, where you replace your_delicious_username with, drumroll please, your Delicious username.
3. Click “OK” and then “Close” and give ‘er a whirl.

After you’ve created the new Delicious-Chrome search, try it out by clicking on your address bar and typing “delicious” followed by your search term — upon hitting enter you should be taken to a Delicious page displaying all your bookmarks related to your search.

Speed Tip: Instead of using the rather cumbersome “delicious” as your keyword for the new search engine, put in something shorter — ie the letter “b” for “bookmark”. Now instead of having to type out “delicious [search_term]” to trigger the search, you can simply type “b [search_term]” instead.

Speed Tip #2: To make things even faster for searching, try using some keyboard shortcuts to access the Chrome address bar.

• CTRL-T opens a new tab and highlights the contents of the address bar. As you’ll most likely want to create a new tab for your search results anyway, this is my recommended option.
• CTRL-L / ALT-D / F6 will all bring your cursor up to the address bar and highlight the contents — in case you don’t wish to leave the tab you’re on.

Final Note: I recommend using the Latest Beta Version of Chrome. At the time of writing, it contains a lot of usability fixes that the standard release does not contain, and while these will undoubtedly make their way into the stable release eventually, why wait? Despite its “beta” tag, the beta version in my experience is just as stable as the standard release.

UPDATE: Sept 13/09 – Since publishing this tip it appears Delicious has changed the formatting of their search URL. As such, I’ve updated the URL structure in #2 to the following: http://delicious.com/search?context=userposts|your_delicious_username&p=%s

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