It annoyed me for ages that I could not type a ticket number like PLA-1234 into the address bar and just land on that ticket, so I would end up opening Jira, clicking into its search box and waiting for it to load, or scrolling back through Slack until I found someone else’s link. It turns out Chrome has supported exactly this for years through site search shortcuts, and setting up both took me about a minute once I knew where to look.

How site search works

Chrome keeps a list of search engines, each of which is a short keyword plus a URL template with a %s placeholder in it. Type the keyword into the address bar, press Space or Tab, and Chrome switches into keyword mode for that engine, with a Search Jira chip showing on the left of the address bar. Whatever comes after that gets URL-encoded and dropped into the %s slot when you press Enter.

Nothing actually requires the template to point at a search page though. Any URL where the variable part sits in a predictable place works, and ticket pages are a perfect fit since the only thing that changes between them is the key. A key like PLA-1234 is made up of letters, digits and a hyphen, which are all unreserved characters in RFC 3986, so the encoding step leaves it untouched and the resulting path is exactly what would have been typed by hand.

Keyword mode only kicks in when Space or Tab is pressed straight after the exact keyword, so a single letter is perfectly safe - typing javascript into the address bar still does a normal search and nothing is handed to Jira until you type j on its own and hit space.

Setting it up

Open chrome://settings/searchEngines, scroll down to Site search and click Add. Chrome asks for a name, a shortcut and the URL template.

For Jira, the ticket page lives under /browse/, so the template is just the site URL with %s where the key would go.

Field Value
Name Jira
Shortcut j
URL https://your-company.atlassian.net/browse/%s

For Linear, the issue page lives under your workspace slug, which is easy to copy from any issue URL you already have open.

Field Value
Name Linear
Shortcut l
URL https://linear.app/your-workspace/issue/%s

Linear appends a slug of the issue title to its URLs, but it is only there for readability and the page resolves fine without it. Save both and that is it. j PLA-1234 followed by Enter now takes you straight to the ticket.

Other browsers

Edge and Brave are both built on Chromium, so they have the same site search settings page under their own edge:// and brave:// prefixes. In Firefox you get the same behaviour by bookmarking the URL template with the %s still in it and filling in the Keyword field on the bookmark.

Conclusion

Jira and Linear are just the two I use most, but any internal tool with predictable URLs can get the same treatment - GitHub pull requests, Sentry issues, or the user page in your admin panel. My only regret is not doing it sooner, so if you are copying an id into some tool’s search box several times a day, it is worth the minute.