If you’re an admin user of Canvas LMS by Instructure, you frequently have to navigate your account by searching for users and courses in the Admin panel’s search bars for “Users” and “Courses”.
This is a snazzy trick that lets you search your Canvas instance directly from your Chrome browser’s address bar. You can define a custom keyword for each search using Chrome Custom Search Engines, allowing you to invoke the search you want to perform with a simple keyword.
Chrome Custom Search Engines
This is just one use of Chrome’s excellent Custom Search Engines feature, but once you get started with these, you’ll start to realize how useful it can be to search your favorite sites without having to actually navigate to their search page first! Between this trick and my beloved Bang Commands from DuckDuckGo, I can search any site on the internet as fast as I can think!
Works on Chrome and Chromium-based Browsers
You might notice that I’m using the Vivaldi browser in the demo video, not Chrome, but since it’s based on the open source Chromium browser engine, it works just the same as Chrome and other Chromium-based browsers. (BTW Vivaldi is cool, you should check it out if you haven’t!)
Also works in Firefox
If you prefer Firefox browser, you can also create custom search engines using the InstantFox plugin. The steps to create a custom search are different (so RTFM) but the overall effect is the same — you can search all your favorite sites with just a keyword.
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