Is there anyway to manually select search engines? There's a Firefox Omnibar plugin built around the Chrome one and it allows you to have the feature of search engine selection:

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/8823

As you can see by this picture, you can press the icon (Google is showing in the picture) then a drop drop box comes up with all your search engines:
http://i37.tinypic.com/np4aww.jpg

I know about keywords, but it's not as fast and convenient as just clicking an engine. This is one of the features that is keeping me with Firefox.

The option to show an icon on the omnibar that allows you to manually select a search engine would make Chrome perfect!

Can someone request this, or put a word in for it?

+1
Please

Why an extension? Just go to Options > Searches > Manage, and put in 'keywords' for your search engines. Eg., 'a' for AltaVista, 'y' for Yahoo, 'yt' for YouTube, etc.

As soon as you hit space and a character after yt for example, it changes to 'Search YouTube.com:' Easy.

Edit: Just read back and saw that you know how to do this. And it's a big problem? Stick with Firefox.

Selecting from dropdown is sooo 1996
Well it isnt faster at least, keywords is soooo much faster :=) That said, I don't think it will be hard to make such an extension, thought I'm not sure if we currectly can get, what the user has typed in adressbar..? But if not we can probatly ask for this and get the support :=)

Actually, I just wanted to use the Keyword search myself, but realised I'd deleted them! Can someone please post a string to make a search work for YouTube as "yt" + search string? Thanks.

Can someone please post a string to make a search work for YouTube

Is that what you mean?

Code:

http://www.youtube.com/results?search_type=search_videos&search_query=%s&search_sort=relevance&search_category=0&page={startPage?}

PS: You could have just used YouTube's search one time and then it would have been in your "search engine list" ;-)

I meant the string you'd put into the Options page as a new search setting, but as you say, they appear once used anyway. Many thanks.

Is there a way to email any developers to suggest this option in future builds? Where would I post? Is there any developers here that can pass the word along? This is a great feature that's missing in Chrome!

Michael3185:
http://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=%s&page={startPage?}&utm_source=opensearch
..thats what was allready in my setttings

Also, if you dont mind the idea of using keywords then have a look at Fefoo....
http://fefoo.com/
http://fefoo.com/help/
http://fefoo.com/help/commands.html
...Ive listed the home page plus the two pages that explain why its so cool.
If you make fefoo your default search engine you'll allways have a bunch of great keywords...plus I find its toolbar on the search page to be very useful....thanks again to sulasno for pointing this site out (I really like it, introduced me to some nice search engines)