Ahhh I see – sorry for the misunderstanding.
Yeah looks like this was changed upstream. Will ask and see if we have any plans on reverting functionality.
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PLEASE correct this. This was the MAIN reason why I chose Brave and if this isn’t fixed, then I will change back. I use these Site Search shortucts as bookmark-like shortcuts ALL the time.
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Saoiray’s description is exactly my problem. And it hurts… BAD. Unfortunately, adding ?q=%s to the end doesn’t work. Entering the shortcut results in a default search engine search. Entering the shortcut and hitting space (enabled in settings) and then hitting enter also does not work. This just happened to break the day after I migrated from Chrome, having entered roughly 100 shortcuts by hand. Today, most are broken, because they are not queries.
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For the love of all you hold dear, please fix this. I’m going nuts without my shortcuts. And that %s validation needs to be removed. We just need this to work as it has for years (at least for me in Chrome and on my first day in Brave).
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@wavemechanic just bad timing. As I shared with others, it changed on Chromium. So like if you go back to Chrome right now and test you’ll see it’s the same (assuming you have it updated to the latest version)
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Well, if this is soon fixed in Brave, I’ll be even happier I switched. Thanks for bringing that fact to my attention. Nothing like the loss of a feature in the name of progress (talking to you, Google).
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This is happening for me too! When I try to make a new site shortcut, every time I add a URL, it says the URL is invalid, and all my other shortcuts just stopped working suddenly.
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Does anyone know if this bug is going to be fixed? Do the developers know about it? Thanks.
@Tanky if you look through everything, it’s already been discussed. There are also replies from someone from Brave here.
Key thing is: It’s not a bug but instead was a change upstream from Chromium. We don’t yet know if Brave will work on it or even if it might be added again upstream.
How it’s working now is how it used to be long in the past. I hadn’t even realized they added the option as everyone here is used to it. People were using the functionality in a way that they didn’t initially intend it. For whatever reason devs upstream at Chromium seem to have reverted to what it was before, trying to keep Search Engines/Site Search to be just about search and not some alternative for bookmarks.
Again though, it’s being looked into and we’ll see what happens.
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Used to be? I’ve been on Chrome until two days ago, using non-query shortcuts as long as I can remember… well over a decade.
@wavemechanic indeed. I know with absolute certainty I tried adding things before and it did just as we had now, where it required the q=%s. How long or short lived that was, I couldn’t say. Definitely would have been several years ago now though.
I think an example of this as an issue would be Add search engine problem where the person was trying to get Dogpile in but was saying the Add button wouldn’t enable. This was back in 2022.
That said, it’s also possible I’m mixing a few memories together, which is something I’ll have to look more into. For example, if more or less thinking of people who couldn’t set to Default, like: this or here
Then of course this person who was trying to add Presearch via https://engine.presearch.com without the q=%s and no luck.
NOTE
The challenge though is as I went back to try to find some more, a lot of the conversation was about making them default search engines rather than simply adding in the way discussed in this thread.
Memory can be a scary thing. Have to say I don’t want to spend the hours it would take to go through lots of old internet posts to find examples though. I already spent too much time looking through some of the forum posts here looking for the ones linked above.
Thanks for your reply. However, adding ?q=%s at the end of the URL doesn’t fix the problem. It removes the text stating that the URL is invalid, but when I use the shortcut key, it still doesn’t go to the chosen address.
There doesn’t seem to be a clear answer. Maybe I missed something when reading through all the replies?
Is there a way to fix this, so it works like it used to? If not, I might just search for an addon or extension to replace this feature.
Firefox has a really nice option for this, when adding bookmarks. You can give each Bookmark a shortcut. But I stopped using firefox because it was getting to laggy.
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In order create a new !bang
you might just need to submit feedback on https://search.brave.com/ by clicking the gear (settings)
button that appears while on Brave Search and then clicking on
Share Feedbackthat appears in the menu.
@289wk wrong topic? The info you’re sharing isn’t related
@wavemechanic @Gaurav_212005 and others. Not sure if you were following the Github that was created but I do see responses from Brave’s dev team. The answer is Chromium intentionally removed this functionality. It looks like Brave isn’t going to bring it back directly, but may have a workaround based on other functionality. But it would be by creating a bookmark and then the shortcut would have to be at least 3 characters long, such as AMZ.
You can see the replies here but I’ll also quote the key parts below:
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/397720842I 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).
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).
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I don’t see any worth in using that bookmark and doing all that stuff, but anyway, the only option is to just search the full website from it. It seems reasonable to expect Brave to modify the Chromium behavior and reinstate the old behavior or add a completely new system for quick (and I mean quick—two letters, space, enter) shortcuts.
Also the same stuff was said by another user also in that GitHub
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 with the three-letter minimum (I have shortcuts such as “yt,” “sv,” “in,” “gi,” and such).
Also if you can stat the bookmark part more clearly with steps it can be easy to understand it for me and others too
!bangs
Just posited as a workable alternative shortcut method, to reach a website. Might be enough to satisfy some of the customers.
Related / similar issue:
Apparently, Brave Search has incorporated the DuckDuckGo list of !bangs:
Found a comprehensive list of !bangs:
Submit a new !bang or Update an existing !bang:
NOTE: !bangs work in the Brave Search Engine’s search field at:
AND: !bangs work in the Brave Browser URL Address Field - IF Brave Search is set to be the browser’s default search engine.
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I have the same problem.
in section
Site search
To search a specific site or part of Brave, type its shortcut in the address bar, followed by your preferred keyboard shortcut.
I have my own shortcut:
Name: product CI
Shortcut: ci
URL with %s in place of query: https://gitlab.mycompany.net/pipelines
It worked so far that I typed “ci” into URL input box and it opened the “https://gitlab.mycompany.net/pipelines” site.
but this stopped working after the last update to “Version 1.76.73 Chromium: 134.0.6998.45 (Official Build) (64-bit)”.
I use Manjaro distribution.
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Does anyone have a real solution for this problem? None of the messages on this conversation are really a true solution for this problem.
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Squeaking the wheel on this. This is an absolutely breaking feature for me, I use all sorts of two-letter shortcuts to common non-search destinations in my workflow, and will need to switch browsers if this isn’t resolved quickly.
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