The improved Search Bar is a prominent feature on every start page. For a good reason. First, you can use it to do a custom search on Google. But did you know you can use it to search your bookmarks? Now, at the request of many of our users, you can use it to search in your descriptions too. This is how, and why it matters.

Our Search Bar: many functions together

In the redesign of our site we presented last year, we prominently featured the Search Bar. We added several useful features to it, including a Google Custom Search you can use to add Google results quickly to your start page. We added Yahoo and Bing support. Besides this, we made it possible to add as many custom search engines you prefer, including search functions from other websites, like Merriam Webster. In fact, we liked our Search Bar so much that we turned it into a wholly separate Search widget.

An improved Search Bar

In sum: we wanted our Search Bar to be a functional, useful addition to your start page. We also think we’ve succeeded in doing just that. Even more: we believe this Search bar is one of the reasons why there’s nothing like our product on the market. Especially for power-users, with significant collections of bookmarks, RSS-feeds, and other widgets.

And now, the search box is even more useful. We added the functionality to search more than just bookmark titles. Today your search will also return results from the description of any bookmark. And these descriptions are entirely personal. There are several use cases for this new feature:

• Add custom tags or labels to your bookmarks, for quick filtering.
• Locate bookmarks in all your pages at once.
• Multi-label support.

Improve your descriptions

To add a new description or to change a current description, locate the bookmark in your bookmark widget. Right-click the bookmark, and select Edit from the context menu.

In the Edit bookmark pane, you can locate the Description field, and start typing away. Markup is fully supported.

What do you think?

So, that’s it for this time. We hope you like this new addition to your Search Bar functionality. We plan to keep on improving it, of course. We’re thinking about these improvements:

• Make it easier to add new search engines.
• Make it possible to search in Widget titles too.
• Add advanced filtering or search options.

Which of these improvements should we tackle next time? Please let us know what you think. We’d also love to get other improvement suggestions, to don’t hesitate to comment.

Thanks in advance!