Restore custom search engine functionality from version 1.75

[LegalizeNukes]

Description

In Brave 1.75, users were able to define custom search engines with parameters such as the following:

Notice how the "%s" is not included in this shortcut.

Since Brave 1.76, however, the "%s" part of the URL is now mandatory, and the shortcut will not save without it. This is, I would argue, a regression in functionality, as the previous method of handling custom search engines allowed users to quickly access Brave's internal URLs or other websites by just typing a shortcut phrase. While bookmarks or similar methods can be used to achieve a similar result in Brave 1.76, it is not as fast nor as convenient. Perhaps the "%s" part of the URL should remain optional as it was in Brave 1.75.

Steps to reproduce

1. Attempt to create a custom search engine for the purpose of being used as a shortcut by not including the "%s".
2. URL is now highlighted as "not valid" and the custom search engine cannot be saved. Previously saved search engines/shortcuts no longer work.

Actual result

See above.

Expected result

Previous behavior as seen in version 1.75 as described above.

Reproduces how often

Easily reproduced

Brave version (brave://version info)

Brave | 1.76.73 Chromium: 134.0.6998.45 (Official Build) (arm64)
Revision | 7ce94109896c1bebebdd37d24b4ccf28e47deef0
OS | macOS Version 15.3.1 (Build 24D70)

Channel information

• release (stable)
• beta
• nightly

Reproducibility

• with Brave Shields disabled
• with Brave Rewards disabled
• in the latest version of Chrome

Miscellaneous information

No response

[igorburago]

Just ran into this regression after the latest update on macOS. This is annoying to no end! Especially that it not only disallows creating new site search shortcuts without %s in the URL, but also silently ignores all the previously created ones.

This is some user-hostile behavior on the part of the Chromium team that I would suggest the Brave team should consider reverting. There is this creeping trend in modern software nowadays towards punishing power users and it’s very tiring. Perhaps Brave shouldn’t join in on it.

[Jazza-231]

I just ran into this, I frequently use this feature to go to more obscure URLs, typing "@bookmarks" is ridiculously long, I used to be able to type "flr" to go to my cloudflare dashboard for example, and this suddenly stopped working. Please revert this, or add another way to make shortcuts to sites without a search query! Some sites won't even accept a dummy query such as ?ignore=%s, making this new change have no real workaround.

[SantFano]

Same and agreed. I use this all the time to access my most used websites and it's incredibly annoying that it's not working anymore. Part of what makes Brave so great is taking advantage of this kind of user-friendly customization. As other users said: please revert this or add a functionality to create custom search/url bar shortcuts to access websites fast.

[Saoiray]

This seems to be an upstream thing from Chromium as the same thing occurs on Chrome.

To be clear, a lot of what is being talked about by people is that you all were trying to use a little trick to register things as site search/search engine to act like a bookmark with an assigned custom shortcut. These aren't search engines or being used to search for things.

So now I guess is a question of whether they'd return the utility, implement something like this as part of bookmarks, or if it's just going to be gone. But the way people were using this wasn't the intended purpose to begin with.

[igorburago]

Some sites won't even accept a dummy query such as ?ignore=%s, making this new change have no real workaround.

In many cases you can use something like #%20%s¹, but it’s still quite a regression in user experience, because instead of typing a shortcut and pressing Return, you now have to type the shortcut, then press Tab (or Space), and then type at least one non-space character on top of that before you will be allowed to press Return to visit the “search” URL.

Footnotes

1. The %20 prefix in the anchor ID here is to avoid collisions with existing AJAX states for single-page apps or element id attributes on the destination page for regular multi-page sites, as spaces are practically never used in the former and are outright prohibited by both HTML4 and HTML5 in the latter. ↩

[bsclifton]

Hi folks - thanks for raising this

As @Saoiray noted, the removal of this feature came from upstream (Chromium). You can see this same issue being reported in the Chromium issue tracker here:
https://issues.chromium.org/issues/397720842

I asked for more info (the issue where the functionality was removed is private) and I got the following response:

i don't see much in https://issues.chromium.org/issues/388070061 that isn't already in this comment chain.
it was originally a bug that some inactive keywords were not being ignored sometimes. It links a CL that makes sure to correctly ignore disabled keywords. Then another CL to remove non-substituting keyword support without any conversation that's not already included in this bug.

The motive was mainly a) less code to maintain, and b) the alternative of shortcuts and bookmarks is better maintained , more discoverable to users, and less effort required from users.

Now for the good news - Brave does have a work-around you can use, which is in Nightly now. This was a change by Brave team member @fallaciousreasoning with brave/brave-core#27939

Basically:

• you can add a bookmark (in lieu of a shortcut) as a work-around
• the bookmarks need to have a name that is 3 characters or longer
• with this change, bookmarks can be the default result for your omnibox and it should work similarly to search shortcuts

Maybe we can uplift brave/brave-core#27939 (to Beta and possibly even Release) if this does seem like a good solution. Without this fix, bookmarks are always going to be the 2nd result or so in the omnibox (ex: you'd always have to use arrow down).

[bsclifton]

+1 from folks on Reddit here: https://old.reddit.com/r/brave_browser/comments/1j51vbj/all_my_shortcuts_to_access_specific_websites_dont/

[bsclifton]

Brave does have a Quick Shortcuts functionality. You can press Ctrl + Space and a command palette will pop up in the omnibox (just like Sublime, VSCode, etc). There are some pre-defined shortcuts we have here - those are worth exploring.

There's currently no UI for editing these. But maybe it would be cool to have a UI in settings where this can be customized (add/remove items).

[Jazza-231]

Neither of those solutions seem to me to be reasonable alternatives. Obviously as of now the Ctrl + Space menu is essentially useless for our use. Bookmarks aren't fully ideal, especially the 3 letter minmum (I have shortcuts such as "yt" "sv" "in" "gi" and such. It seems reasonable to expect brave modifies the chromium behaviour and reinstate the old behaviour, or add a completely new system for quick (and I mean quick, two letters, space, enter) shortcuts. Maybe implementing bangs which a lot of other browser do could be a good solution?

On the topic of bangs, I am somewhat surprised that brave does not allow the use of entirely custom search engines (Settings > Search engine > Manage search engines and site search > Search engines, it would be nice to specify one such as Theo's unduck (https://unduck.link/) and have all queries go through that.

Back to the site search, I understand we are not using it in it's intended purpose. Would it be reasonable to ask of brave to modify their version of chromium to add this back? Unless I am misunderstanding, brave's comittment to supporting manifest v2 when chromium wont does mean brave makes changes to their chromium, making it realistic that this change could be made too.

[bsclifton]

@Jazza-231 for sure, it's technically possible that we could revert https://chromium-review.googlesource.com/c/chromium/src/+/6164610 on the Brave side. We have a growing list of deviations from the Chromium core - most should be documented on our page here:
https://github.com/brave/brave-browser/wiki/Deviations-from-Chromium-(features-we-disable-or-remove)

We have asked upstream for usage metrics (see https://issues.chromium.org/issues/397720842#comment5). There definitely are folks using this, even if it's not intended to have been used that way. I don't think we'll see metrics though, unfortunately. And I don't think it's reasonable to comparable that to manifest v2, which is something we have agreed to take on.

If the Ctrl + Space menu DID support shortcuts like this, would that be a good replacement? Would just be a change in keyboard shortcut (instead of Ctrl + L or F6) at that point. That is something I think we could scope out and prioritize. We could potentially even pull the shortcuts from the same place (ex: read the existing values in brave://settings/searchEngines => site search).

[igorburago]

If the Ctrl + Space menu DID support shortcuts like this, would that be a good replacement?

In my opinion, it would not. The beauty of shortcuts as they were—both for search engines and standalone bookmarks—is the unified interface, where the address bar acts as a single entry point that effectively routes you towards all these different destinations. Because of this, you don’t even need to think which interface element or keyboard shortcut to use to get to the right routing mode. The universality of input is the whole point in this case!

From your suggestions, it seems to me that you don’t use this kind of functionality and, hence, do not intuitively understand the usefulness of such interface. Since you are in a position that would allow you to initiate a revert of this regression, I’d like to double down on my explanation here a little bit so that you could perhaps internalize how it feels to those who routinely use keyword shortcuts:

• Imagine browsers went back to using separate text fields for URLs and search requests. How would you feel about such a change? You can even imagine someone saying: “What’s the problem? Use this shortcut to go to the URL field, and that shortcut to go to the search field.” Yes, it might be the same number of keystrokes, but the universality of the interface is lost—and you viscerally feel the added friction.
• Another way to grasp how it feels is to, for instance, use site search in Safari on macOS. It does not allow you to set up your own custom shortcuts for different engines, and makes you type the domain of the site instead. Even though it can be Tab-completed, it’s quite limiting compared to implementations where you are allowed to define custom keywords; if you are used to those, you feel it right away.
• Yet another case in point: Talk to those who switched from the builtin Spotlight search field to Alfred on macOS; most of them will express a rather similar sentiment.

There is a place for a unified keyword-based routing feature—with or without an accompanying query string—and it doesn’t matter which box you are going to put it in: It can be query-less custom search shortcuts, or custom keywords for bookmarks, or a distinct keyword registry; the nomenclature does not matter.

If the reversal of this regression as a special case of the site search shortcut functionality is out of the question, then a good replacement could be to add a keyword field in the bookmarks manager, which would be the same way Firefox exposes this feature to its users, for example. And if you will go this route, please don’t impose a lower bound on the length of a keyword.

[Jazza-231]

I believe we've reached an agreement, the points @igorburago made are very well said. I also agree it's not a fair comparison between this "feature" and mv2 support, but actually unfair in our favour as this is a much simpler change. I don't think anyone agrees that this is the intended use of the site search feature, and perhaps it would be a good idea to create a seperate shortcut system.

Anything that is quick and more importantly, repeteable, will work. My strife with auto completing the common websites or bookmarks is that those can change order quite frequently:

I used to type "cloud" and go to cloudflare. After using the service "cloudinary" often, now that same string, despite them both being used and bookmarked at the time, goes to cloudinary. However "flr" + space + enter will always go to cloudflare no matter what.

[igorburago]

Yeah, I even used a number of keywords like that to get to those nested Brave settings pages without fiddling with completion or clicking around every time. E.g., compare opening settings and going to brave://settings/content/all manually from the root page vs. firing a new tab and just typing, say, @dReturn without even focusing your eyes at the address bar. Same for brave://settings/shields/filters (or chrome-extension://‹ublock-origin-extension-id›/dashboard.html#1p-filters.html if you use uBlock Origin instead), or even brave://settings/searchEngines itself.

Sure, if you have only a handful of such pages (and I’m not talking just about Brave settings here, of course, but in general), it’s easy to have all of them in the bookmarks bar ready to be clicked. But as soon as you have more than that, the usual bookmarking features become really inefficient: You have to either navigate nested menus of bookmark folders or engage in a mini autocompletion session in the address bar, making sure that you type just enough of a hint for the completion engine and press the Down key the right number of times (at least once) to get to the entry you have in mind, which diverts (however small) chunk of your attention from the task at hand. Both ways add that extra bit of friction to the power users’ experience.

The text-based keyword system, on the other hand, can gracefully support many more routes in the same unified interface, without it being overloaded or additionally complicated—especially since it’s already present for configurable site searches anyway!

[mat-lo]

100% in favor of bringing back the text based system. Its absence totally disrupted my flow in the past few days. I had shortcuts like d for google drive, m for gmail, s for google slides, etc. and now there's no way I can do that natively in brave. I'm falling back to raycast shortcuts (i'm on macos), but that's not as quick. I would really really love for these to come back :)

[dsnvwlmnt]

Definitely a jarring "bug" for me, as I've used this functionality extensively for years possibly going on a decade. I've practically used up the entire alphabet for 1-letter shortcuts to sites, have many 2-letter combos, and almost none 3-letters or more.

If I have to type 3 letters, might as well just use the 1st three letters of the address that will pop it up from memory without going through the hassle of making bookmark workardounds.

[tinzi1]

I was appointed here with the same issue, things are getting too technical for me but it seems like when everything is running perfectlly fine, someone somehow got an idea that let's break something randomly.

Anyway, is there an extension to replace this function?

[Jazza-231]

Anyway, is there an extension to replace this function?

As far as I know, no there is not.

[q2apro]

Cannot live without URL shortcuts. It's terrible not to have them anymore. Never remove a feature that is used by millions of people in their daily workflow.

When people moved from Firefox to Chrome, the "keyword for URLs" feature was one of the most important ones that was missing. Then the hack via "custom search engine" got famous. See especially here: How can I create a URL shortcut in Chrome? (Superuser)

In the superuser thread there is also a browser extension mentioned, but it does not work.

With a working extension, we could get rid of this hack.

My daily workflow requires shortcuts to websites. This saves me hours.

Extension

Browser extensions like "Web Aliases" or Alias do not work anymore either.

Setting up the shortcuts works, but the triggering from the browser's address bar is not working.

---

I guess I just revert back to a previous version of Brave. Cannot work today normally. ALL SHORTCUTS don't work. I use them every 5 minutes!

---

The easiest usability would be to have another field below "URL". This should be called "shortcut" or "keyword".

[marinersfan]

This is very unfortunate. I use this function with a ton of sites all the time, so I may have to go back to Firefox until this gets remedied. What a bummer.

[dsnvwlmnt]

When people moved from Firefox to Chrome, the "keyword for URLs" feature was one of the most important ones that was missing. Then the hack via "custom search engine" got famous. See especially here: How can I create a URL shortcut in Chrome? (Superuser)

In the superuser thread there is also a browser extension mentioned, but it does not work.

With a working extension, we could get rid of this hack.

Funny, I never even knew this was a "hack". I discovered it naturally while using Custom Searches and thought it was intended.

[gooddosh]

Thanks for supporting Manifest V2 extensions. It's the reason I switched to Brave full time a few days ago. As many have stated, I REALLY want my search engines to work as they have for years, allowing non-query entries. I am really angry with Google. Do they even use their own browsers at home?

[mat-lo]

https://github.com/brave/brave-browser/releases/tag/v1.74.51

this is one of the latest versions that still supports text based shortcuts, i'm using it until this gets resolved.

[bsclifton]

@igorburago we definitely could look at getting special character shortcuts working in the future. With this issue closed, maybe that would be a good new issue to create. But definitely I would recommend trying what we have first 😄

[hulet]

Yeah sorry its not a perfect replacement - hopefully better than nothing though.
...
let us know if its bearable as a workaround.

At first I was like "I want my old custom search engine functionality back" but thinking about this longer--Bookmarks are much easier to import/export/sync between profiles and devices.

I installed Brave Nightly and I think this is actually an improvement. :)

Thanks again for the quick turnaround. I love my custom website keyboard shortcuts! And I'm going to love having the same set of custom website keyboard shortcuts on every profile and device without needing to recreate them one by one.

[gooddosh]

Interesting. Looking forward to trying this in a release or beta (since Nightly uses completely a different config).

At first I was like "I want my old custom search engine functionality back" but thinking about this longer--Bookmarks are much easier to import/export/sync between profiles and devices.

I installed Brave Nightly and I think this is actually an improvement. :)

[q2apro]

Please post here when a fix or another solution has been implemented in the official release.

Thank you 🙏

[bsclifton]

Quick update - the fix by @fallaciousreasoning will be in 1.78, which will hit release channel on April 29th

The folks at Google did have a formal response this morning about the original feature being removed:

On behalf of Chrome, I'd like to extend an apology for the disruption this recent change has caused those who relied on it for their day to day browsing or work. We took your feedback seriously, actively reviewed and explored a range of options, and I'm happy to announce we decided to bring this functionality back. You can expect to start using your saved keyword shortcuts again in the next Chrome release (136 milestone) at the end of this month.

We made the initial decision to discontinue offering keyword shortcuts based on limited usage data and internal polling of developers to see if they use this feature regularly. The goal of the deprecation was so we can focus on improving the experience for other widely used features in the Omnibox and support long term code maintainability goals. We recognize that changes like this can significantly impact the daily workflows of a subset of users, regardless of the volume of usage data. We will keep those lessons in mind and find alternative ways to support our engineering goals without disrupting your workflows.

Full response here https://issues.chromium.org/issues/397720842#comment171

Chromium 136 also lines up with Brave product version 1.78 (April 29th)

[Jazza-231]

Thank you bsclifton that is great to hear, ultimately not the most polished solution, but thats what we get for using a hacky albeit useful method for quick shortcuts 😅 I'm happy to have it back, thanks to the chrome team too, it's always nice to be heard.

[q2apro]

Why not release it earlier ... still 27 days without this feature. What a damage.

[gooddosh]

bsclifton, this is wonderful news. Thanks for letting us know here. I'll stay on the old working version until the 136 milestone Brave release.

[igorburago]

@bsclifton, thank you very much for pushing for the interests of the affected users in the Chromium issue tracker and other communication channels behind the scenes!

[fallaciousreasoning]

Why not release it earlier ... still 27 days without this feature. What a damage.

@q2apro If you need it earlier you can test it out in Nightly or Beta. We want to give it some time to cook so we can see if I've broken something else by changing this - we know it sucks when the Omnibox breaks.

[Saoiray]

We want to give it some time to cook

@fallaciousreasoning they just want to use the microwave or air fryer. While it turns out better in the slow cooker, too many people are hungry and don't want to wait. lol

Joking aside, do appreciate y'all have a handle on this. Definitely nice to see one or both fixes landing before long.

[q2apro]

I think most developers here do not realize how much time of other users/developers was wasted by removing this feature.

Again, I use those "shortcuts for boomarks" every 5 minutes. They are part of my daily workflow, and I work 15 hours per day.

Imagine you are a carver and someone takes one of your mosted used knives away...

[fallaciousreasoning]

Sorry @q2apro - upstream removed this from out from under us. They've since reverted the change but it won't be back until 1.78.

In the meantime, we've also added a new fix which should let you use bookmark titles as shortcuts (also in 1.78, unfortunately). This will have the added advantage that it will sync between your devices (though as @igorburago noted it doesn't work with special characters). Unfortunately there's no fix for 1.77. In the meantime you're welcome to test things out in 1.78 (Beta) or 1.79 (Nightly)

[q2apro]

I have installed the release "Nightly v1.79.48 (Chromium 135.0.7049.84)" with BraveBrowserStandaloneNightlySetup.exe

Now all my settings and bookmarks are missing. I hoped the nightly build takes over this data.

Do I have to use sync or do I need to manually import all my data?

Update:

I have used the Sync Chain and it seems to work. Thank you.

⚠️ However, my bookmark shortcuts do not work with this nightly build version.

[MadhaviSeelam]

Verification PASSED using

Brave | 1.78.79 Chromium: 135.0.7049.84 (Official Build) beta (64-bit)
-- | --
Revision | 0652a32c78a9368ee4db35ca5f58e641cda324a4
OS | Windows 11 Version 24H2 (Build 26100.3476)

1. Installed 1.78.79
2. launched Brave
3. opened brave://settings/appearance in a new tab
4. clicked the bookmark icon to add to bookmarks
5. created a shortcut folder in the bookmarks
6. saved the url with the title app
7. closed the tab
8. followed the steps 3-7 for an internal site brave://settings/leo-ai with the title Leo
9. followed the steps 3-7 for a website nytimes.com with the title ny in the bookmarks bar
10. bookmarks shortcuts are shown in the bookmarks panel
11. in a new tab, entered app into the omnibox
12. confirmed the url brave://settings/appearance is shown
13. pressed enter and the brave://settings/appearance page loaded as expected
14. verified for leo, ny bookmarks shortcuts and results shown as expected

2025-04-10_10h29_36.mp4

[q2apro]

@MadhaviSeelam Thank you for the video. This seems to work.

Bookmarks do NOT work the old way anymore.

Now simply the bookmark title is the shortcut!!!

This needs to be communicated prominently.

[Hellreaver]

@Jazza-231 for sure, it's technically possible that we could revert https://chromium-review.googlesource.com/c/chromium/src/+/6164610 on the Brave side. We have a growing list of deviations from the Chromium core - most should be documented on our page here: https://github.com/brave/brave-browser/wiki/Deviations-from-Chromium-(features-we-disable-or-remove)

We have asked upstream for usage metrics (see https://issues.chromium.org/issues/397720842#comment5). There definitely are folks using this, even if it's not intended to have been used that way. I don't think we'll see metrics though, unfortunately. And I don't think it's reasonable to comparable that to manifest v2, which is something we have agreed to take on.

If the Ctrl + Space menu DID support shortcuts like this, would that be a good replacement? Would just be a change in keyboard shortcut (instead of Ctrl + L or F6) at that point. That is something I think we could scope out and prioritize. We could potentially even pull the shortcuts from the same place (ex: read the existing values in brave://settings/searchEngines => site search).

I think it would be pretty close, as long as the GUI was well put-together and shortcuts could be as short as we want. I use windows+typing to pull up almost all programs incredibly quickly and this would be very similar.

Unrelated so I apologize but I'm still waiting for customizable profile icons (some chromium thing broke that)

[MadhaviSeelam]

Verification PASSED

Brave | 1.78.84 Chromium: 135.0.7049.100 (Official Build) beta (arm64)
-- | --
Revision | 98cfa0e93c1b61488f7d0804518d360c197df69e
OS | macOS Version 15.3.1 (Build 24D70)

1. Installed 1.78.84
2. launched Brave
3. opened brave://settings/appearance in a new tab
4. clicked the bookmark icon to add to bookmarks
5. created a shortcut folder in the bookmarks
6. saved the url with the title app
7. closed the tab
8. followed the steps 3-7 for an internal site brave://settings/leo-ai with the title Leo
9. followed the steps 3-7 for a website nytimes.com with the title ny in the bookmarks bar
10. bookmarks shortcuts are shown in the bookmarks panel
11. in a new tab, entered app into the omnibox
12. confirmed the url brave://settings/appearance is shown
13. pressed enter and the brave://settings/appearance page loaded as expected
14. verified for leo, ny bookmarks shortcuts and results shown as expected

Screen.Recording.2025-04-22.at.3.48.34.PM.mov