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Search Bar Shortcuts — Enter keywords instead of full URLs in your browser
Sometimes typing a URL is faster than opening a bookmark. ⚡️Search Bar Shortcuts (Omnibox shortcuts) are built for people who often access some websites this way. The extension makes it even quicker, more reliable & predictable.
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Hey @sasi513, thanks for checking our solution. We haven't seen your product all the way until launching ours here. It's outstanding that you had this idea so much time ago, good job 👏. Yet, we'd build ours anyways.
The reason is actually that "go" keyword you mentioned. Our first functional build was working absolutely the same way, with typing an "app keyword" first and then the "shortcut". But we felt it's a little disturbing for the flow. So the second built allowed to type the "shortcut" right away, which was not present in any other solution.
Additionally, our extension is absolutely cross-browser, which also is not the case for any similar that exists out there.
Hey Hunters! 👋
Maks and Maks are here, founders of Toast (Product of the Day).
Today we're glad to launch a new useful extension to make your everyday workflow in a browser a bit easier and faster. If you always use shortcuts everywhere or enter tons of the same URLs daily, Search Bar Shortcuts will fit perfectly for you.
A few lines about the product below:
⭐️How it works
1. Set the shortcut and the link it should open (like "e" = example.com);
2. Type the shortcut into the browser search bar and hit ↵Enter;
3. Instead of your search engine page, the extension opens the page you defined.
✅ Extension RUNS LOCALLY on your device. No data/request is ever sent or received.
Note: to achieve a natural feel, and due to technical limitations, the search results page actually opens. Then the extension reads your search request. If it matches one of the shortcuts, the page gets immediately replaced with the set page. This is why the extension requests access to your search engine page.
⭐️Supported
🔗 Link types: http, https, ftp, local files (works only in some browsers).
🕵️♂️ Search engines: Google, Bing, Yahoo, DuckDuckGo, Ecosia, Yandex, Mail.ru.
💻 Browsers: Chromium browsers (Chrome, Opera, Edge, Brave...), Firefox, Safari (search in the Mac App Store)
💡Usage ideas/examples
1. Get straight to the needed page (avoid home, welcome, and other pages on your way to your everyday content).
Example: Open Jira, Trello, Clubhouse, or Asana board bypassing the home page
2. Open the same pages with different accounts.
Example: Google uses different URLs to open different accounts for Gmail, Calendar & other products. You can set 'g1' to open your personal Gmail and 'g2' - for the work one.
3. Open your company page without typing the exact URL.
Example: Usually, organizations have multiple pages on their domain. SaaS companies can additionally have app subdomains. Because of this, when you type company.com or app.company.com, many suggestions appear, which do not always match what you need. Set 'app' for your SaaS app page, 'ccom' for the company home page. It makes entering the page quick and reliable, just type the shortcut and you're guaranteed to open that exact page.
☄️ Additional suggestions
1. To avoid coincidence with your real search requests use short text for your shortcuts that is unlikely to ever become the word you search for.
2. You may use special characters at the beginning of the shortcuts to make it even less likely to be your search request. For example, you can use a dash '-ccom'.
Enjoy and please drop your comments. 🙂
This looks really promising! If I sync my extensions with Chrome on multiple devices, does it work on multiple devices? Or do I have to enter the shortcut list each time?
Thank you @alexsmacd, we’re glad that you like it.
We decided to go without sync for the first iteration.
The reason is the following. In the product video you could see that one of the usage examples is opening a Google product with different user using a shortcut. It’s possible because Google uses different urls for those.
However those urls are dependent on the individual browser. So even though your chrome browsers are synced, one could have more Google accounts logged in or they could be logged into in a different order.
So syncing the same link would create a problem, because it would be opening a wrong account on one of the devices.
Thus having no sync allows more customization. Yet it’s a little more work.
Probably there won’t be too many shortcuts saved though, because people don’t access too many websites on a daily basis by typing url. So up to 10 shortcuts won’t be too hard to duplicate.
For the less frequent link opening we recommend using bookmarks, as they are just better for that :)
But thank you for the comment, maybe in the future iterations we’ll allow turning sync on/off manually, which would solve for both use cases.
@maksym_shynkarenko Thank you for the response. That makes sense. I was watching the video on my phone and missed the user-switching.
Thank you, @rahxul, I'm glad you are not disappointed in what we built and actually like the product.
Please, don't be too hard on yourself, 4 days is a very short period to launch a product. So it's great that you are aimed at launching MVP that fast. To smooth out your feelings about not making it in time, I'll tell you that we've built this product awhile ago, about 2-3months back. But we were postponing the launch because we had no branding, website and so on and there were higher priorities. So I'm sure you'll have another great idea.
Thank you so much for considering sharing your thoughts on the product improvement, it is very very appreciated. Feel free to share feature requests down here in the comments or write us an email to dotoast.com@gmail.com.
Good luck with your future/current projects :)
Hey @maksym_shynkarenko, Thank you for replying. I am shocked it took you 2 months, that's a lot of commitment for the product that's not going to make any revenue. I'll surely right you to the mail with the feature requests.
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