Press "Tab" to Search

Add the ability to search by pressing the tab button on your keyboard. This feature is currently on Google Chrome.

Start typing the address of the site you’d like to search (let’s stick with YouTube for this example). Assuming you’ve accessed YouTube in the past (what an outrageous assumption!), Chrome will auto complete the rest of the URL as soon as you start typing.

Once you see “youtube .com” in the address bar, you can press the Tab button on your keyboard to activate the search. The URL in the address bar will then convert to a search engine saying – “Search YouTube Video Search:” which is when you type in your query and hit enter. (TAKEN FROM THIS WEBSITE)Google-Chrome-Tab-To-Search

I miss this I used it daily in chrome.

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There’s a little trick I figured out to solve this problem. It doesn’t work exactly like Chrome but it’s close enough.

Go to brave://settings/searchEngines
Click Add next to Other Search Engines
From here you can add in a custom search engine that you can search via Tab after typing in the keyword.

So for YouTube I did:
Search Engine: YouTube
Keyword: you
URL with %s in place of query: https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=%s
image

Now in browser if you type you then hit tab I’ll be searching YouTube.
Hope this helps.

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Yes – as @JBroadway says, you can do this with any search engine added to your list (via open search, simply perform a search on the site to add it to your list of engines).

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Why doesn’t Brave automatically detect search engines like Chrome/Chromium/Ungoogled? Is there any reason why it’s disabled - something related to privacy? Is there a flag we could toggle to bring that auto detection back?

Tab to Search combined with an automatic search engine detection provides an excellent experience, having to manually set up every single search engine ruins it.
It’s a pet peeve of mine I have with other big browsers like Firefox, Vivaldi, as well as Brave. It’s the last thing keeping me on Ungoogled.

EDIT: Actually Brave does in fact automatically detect search engines. To enable it go to SettingsSearch engine → make sure Index other search engines is enabled. It’s for whoever stumbles upon this forum thread trying to resolve the same issue.
Thanks Brave devs ^^

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You need to make sure that site search is active for those particular sites.

Even better:

go to brave://settings/searchEngines

Go to site site search (check inactive shotcuts first below that and add your websites)

Under site search edit or add your website.
For the “shortcut” put in the full name of the website.
For example, for YouTube, put in “youtube.com” as the shortcut.

Now, whenever you search you or yout or anything close, you can do a tab search in the omnibox. You can do this for any website. As long as it is the first result, you should be able to tab search it.

The search engine doesn’t have to be a website. I configured this to let me search the Settings page with “sett” and Tab.

image

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