Chances are if you are a heavy Google Chrome user you are also a diligent sampler of other Google products – specifically Google Docs today. The readily accessible, easily collaborative document editing platform is strangely sufficient for 90% of all use cases where one would normally turn to Microsoft Office. If you’ve not yet checked out the platform I’d politely urge you to do so.

Back to the task at hand – last week I spoke on how to expand the Chrome search bar to encompass searching within the currently viewed web site. Utilizing this concept, a few tweaks can be applied that expands the functionality to include your Google Docs repository. From your Chrome search bar you can not only search Internet content but also your own content contained within the Google cloud. It’s really all about easy of use and access and this deep level of integration will probably eventually be a default method in future Chrome releases, in my opinion.

Inside Chrome, right-click in the address bar and chose Edit search engines.

Provide a name and a search keyword - the keyword will be what signifies to Chrome to search the defined location.

The third box is where the magic actually happens – for the location we want to use one of two web addresses, depending if you are using your personal Google Docs location or one provided by a Google Apps domain.

Now returning to our Chrome address bar we can initiate a Docs search by first pre-pending our keyword docs followed by our search string.

Chrome will then redirect the search to our location and return any and all results in one fell swoop.