Search all your open browser tabs or bookmarked pages

You’ll thank me for this one! As we know, writing and editing can involve checking a lot of facts, and the number of open tabs on my browser window can quickly spiral out of control. Then it can be hard to remember which of the open pages had a particular piece of information or topic. If only you could search all your open tabs at once rather than searching each in turn.

It turns out you can – and have been able to for a while, but I’ve only just discovered this Chrome extension called Search Plus.

Once you’ve installed the extension, you can enter a search term and find out which of the web pages contain it. You can sort the results in various ways (e.g. by title, time opened), and you can also do other operations on those tabs, such as collecting them together in a single window. Clever, don’t you think? I can see this saving me from getting lost in a swamp of tabs when I’ve been on an internet chase of a particular topic.

There are other extensions that will allow you to search multiple tabs, and also in different browsers, so have a look around. In Chrome, Tab Tab Search also has good ratings.

For Search Plus, there are some instructions at https://dottech.org/166191/how-to-search-all-opened-tabs-in-chrome-tip/.

And you can download Search Plus from the Chrome web store.

One neat way to use a search across multiple tabs is to search all the webpages you’ve bookmarked in a particular folder. A right click (PC) or double-click (Mac) on a bookmark folder will give you the option of opening all the bookmarks in that folder; they’ll open as tabs. Then you can use your multiple tab extension to search for your keyword.

You’re welcome.

This article was originally published in the Editors Victoria December 2017 newsletter. (link updated to IPEd archive, members only)