Web search & keyword shortcuts

Web search suggestions

As you type, up to three suggestions from a search engine appear near the bottom of the results, above the “Search in” section described below — and above the trailing “Search the web for …” row too, on the occasions that row is present rather than replaced by the “Search in” section’s own Google row. Settings → Drawer → Web → “Search suggestions” turns this on and off (on by default, and only available while web search itself is on), and “Suggestion engine” picks Google or DuckDuckGo, with Google as the default. The suggestions heading only appears when there’s an actual suggestion under it, so with the feature off, offline, or before you’ve typed enough characters, the result list looks exactly as it would without the feature at all.

Tapping a suggestion fills the search box with it rather than running it, so you can edit it first or route it to another service — see The keyword chip below for what happens to a suggestion tap when a service keyword chip is showing.

This is the drawer’s only use of the network: what you type is sent to whichever engine you’ve chosen. Suggestions don’t reach the engine until you’ve typed at least three characters, and stop entirely once your phone’s Data Saver mode is on — a metered connection alone doesn’t block them, since most people are on one most of the time and that would make the feature effectively absent.

Under the hood

A request in flight is fully canceled rather than merely ignored the moment the query changes underneath it — clearing the suggestion cache entirely, not only that one query’s entry — so it doesn’t sit around waiting to time out on its own. Suggestions also aren’t sent for anything that looks like a paste rather than a typed query.

Searching within another app or service

A “Search in” section, on by default, hands your typed query to a named app or service — searching YouTube, asking Gemini, or opening an Amazon product page — without retyping it there. Ten services ship enabled, with Google pinned first and never reordered: Gemini, YouTube, Maps, Amazon, Reddit, Spotify, Play Store, Gmail, and Photos fill out the rest, in that default order until your own usage reorders them. Four more — Wikipedia, Translate, eBay, and X — are available but ship off. Anything else on your phone that offers its own search can be turned on in Settings with a keyword of your choosing, and you can add a custom service by hand with a name and a search-page address.

While Google is turned on in this list, it takes the place of the drawer’s trailing “Search the web for …” row rather than sitting above a second one. Switch Google off in the list and the trailing row returns.

Every row but Google is ordered by how often you use it, fading over time so a service you’ve stopped reaching for drifts back down. Settings → Drawer → Apps → “Search in” also has a “Maximum rows” slider (3–20, 10 by default) with a “Show more” button for the rest, and a “Ranking data” control that clears that usage tally.

The keyword chip

Typing a service’s keyword followed by a space — yt, then a space — routes the rest of your query to that service and turns the keyword into a rounded chip naming it (“YouTube”). One backspace removes the chip and restores the plain keyword text.

Once a chip is up, the app, contact, and calendar sections drop out, the search-in section collapses to that one row alone, and the trailing web row goes with it — only web suggestions stay, since those complete your query no matter where it’s headed. The suggestions describe what the box currently shows, not the raw text you typed, so with a YouTube chip up and “otters” typed, suggestions are fetched for “otters,” not for “yt otters.” The scoped row itself sits last, under the suggestions, since it is the action those suggestions are refining.

Tapping a web suggestion while a chip is up keeps the chip — it fills in the remaining text without disturbing the keyword. Tapping a row from your search history behaves differently: a stored past query replaces the whole box, chip and all, since a recalled query may already carry its own keyword.

Enter

Pressing Enter fires the first actionable row rather than whatever happens to be sitting on top of the list, so a header or a suggestion is always skipped over. With a keyword chip up, that one scoped row is what Enter reaches, whatever it is. Without a chip: Enter opens the top app when the query matches one, and otherwise falls back to the search-in section’s pinned Google row — the same “search the web for what you typed” behavior Enter has always had. Other search-in rows besides that pinned one are skipped too, since nothing on screen shows which of the ten services Enter would open.

Suggestion rows get the same treatment, and for the same reason: if Enter fired whatever sat on top of an app-empty list, a suggestion could get launched without you ever having typed it, with nothing on screen indicating that’s what would happen.

Limits

Suggestions don’t draw on your local search history, and nothing you type is used to improve them beyond the one request it’s sent for. There’s no suggestions row on the drawer’s home surface — that surface keeps showing your own past searches instead. A failed request shows nothing at all, with no error message. Only Google and DuckDuckGo are offered; there’s no way to point suggestions at a different engine.

Search-in routing is keyword-only — there’s no automatic detection of which service a query is “about.” A discovered service stays off until you turn it on yourself. The section doesn’t learn from a service you scroll past without tapping, only from ones you actually use.