If you’ve ever right clicked a word or phrase in Chrome, selected ‘Search Google for’ and thought it was a nice, useful way to quickly search Google, then read on; because ‘Drag & Drop Search’ modifies that simple idea to make it an order of magnitude more useful, and to make numerous search services available at your fingertips.
As the name suggests, Drag & Drop Search lets you highlight a word or phrase, then it divides the screen into 12 different dropzones representing 12 different search options (including Google, Wikipedia, YouTube, Facebook, and Twitter).
You can then simply drag your text onto the service you want to search. Simple, yet somehow brilliant!
How to use: select a bunch of text (a word or phrase), then start dragging it. The screen will immediately be overlayed with 12 different areas representing different search options; drag your word or phrase onto the service you want, and your search for that text will be performed immediately in a new tab.
Customization: if you would rather, say, search ‘Freewaregenius’ rather than badiu or whatever, you can go to the options screen and customize the dropzones (see screenshot below)
In this way, you can add all the services or sites you want to search and remove any that you don’t. To find the search URL to add, simply go to the site you want, use it’s searchbox to search for a word, then grab the resulting URL, take the word your searched for out of it (typically it will show as s=word or something like that), and paste that into the ‘URL’ field in the the settings page for Drag & Drop Search.
Drag & Drop Search will even grab the Favicon for any service or site that you add, which is a nice touch.
The verdict
Terrific. This is going on my list of must-have Chrome extensions. It’s not just that it is so original and innovative, but this is such a great practical solution that is badly needed, especially in a world that so needs an alternative to Google’s search dominance (my 2 cents there).
[Thanks to reader Panzer for tipping us off about this great extension]
Get Drag and Drop Search (Chrome).
