Add Custom Search Engine to Opera Browser

This post will show you how to add custom search engine to opera browser. Opera ships with built-in support for six popular search engines namely Google, Yahoo, DuckDuckGo, Amazon, Bing, and Wikipedia. But even those are not enough and having several more would be handy and adds to a greater level of browser customization.

You can add any website as custom search engine to opera and it will let you stay within opera and search for the specific site without going to the site itself. Let's see how to add 'Youtube' as custom search engine to opera but you can pretty much add any websites of your choice.

How to Add Custom Search Engine to Opera Browser

1. To add custom search engine in opera, go to 'Opera' menu and choose 'Settings'.
2. In settings tab click on 'Browser' and navigate to 'Search' header.
3. Under 'Search' click on 'Manage search engines...' button to open a popup window, then click on 'Add new search' button.
4. In the provided form, enter Youtube against the 'Name' for the search engine.
5. Next provide yt for the 'Keyword'. This can be of one or more characters and make sure it is unique. This is a kind of shortcut to use before your search query in Opera address bar to search for that particular website.
6. For 'Address' you have to provide the site's search url with '%s' in place of query. To get this url, go to 'youtube.com' and type 'aerobics for beginners' in the search box. Now get the url of the results page shown. It reads something like, https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=aerobics+for+beginners
7. Please note that '+' sign will be added instead of space character in your query. Remove the entire query from the url and add '%s' instead. It should look like, https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=%s. Now add this url to the address text box and hit 'Save'.
8. That's it! You have successfully added YouTube as your custom search engine to opera. Let's check if it works. Go to opera address bar and type your query preceded with 'yt' (e.g. yt aerobics) and hit enter. Yey! The search page you see will be from youtube.com. From now on you can search for YouTube videos directly from opera search bar without leaving it.

Also Read: Change Default Search Engine in Opera

Likewise you can easily add custom search engines to opera browser. Follow the similar steps for any website you want to add as custom search engine in opera. It's a pretty nifty feature indeed!