Currently the search features for various Roblox services (the developer hub, games, library, etc.) suck, and as developers we need to use these quite often. To lessen time wasted dealing with this, I have an alternative. In this tutorial I will go over a better way to search using features of search engines and the custom search engine feature available in many browsers.
Note that while this method is overall better, in some areas the default Roblox search might be more helpful. It is possible, for example, that some Models have never been seen by search engines, and so they won’t show up in search results. However, when dealing with things that obscure I’d doubt Roblox’s search would be able to give you helpful results, either.
Search by site
Search engines such as Google and DuckDuckGo have a feature that limits search results to a certain URL. You can do it simply by writing KEYWORDS site:URL, for example part site:developer.roblox.com would give the API reference page for the Part instance.
This example shows how useful this feature is. Simply by doing this, you have a (mostly) reliable way to search Roblox’s documentation (or any other Roblox thing), without the needing to deal with the broken functionality of Roblox’s search systems. And on top of that, you get all the benenfits of using a search engine, such as "exact match" and -exclude.
So if you want to look for something in documentation, you can just do: SEARCH_TERM site:developer.roblox.com
If you want to search Roblox: SEARCH_TERM site:roblox.com
If you want to search games: SEARCH_TERM site:roblox.com/game
If you want to search the library: SEARCH_TERM site:roblox.com/library
Or anything else you like, as long as you know the important parts of the URL. However, it can be a pain to write these out every time you want to search something, which is what custom search engines are for.
Custom search engines
Most browsers these days let you add custom search engines, which are essentially just URLs the browser inserts your search into.
For example, when you search google using your browser, you type in SEARCH TERM, and then the browsers substitutes that into a template URL like google.com/search?q=%s, replacing %s with SEARCH TERM to give google.com/search?q=SEARCH+TERM. Also note how the spaces in SEARCH TERM get replaced with + (or %20) as spaces are not part of URL syntax. Finally, the browser sends you to that given URL: google.com/search?=SEARCH+TERM.
And that’s all a search engine is, from a browser’s perspective. If your browser supports it, you can add as many of these template URLs you like, and these URLs can be whatever you want.
Adding a custom search engine
To make searching Roblox faster, we can utilise this feature to search Roblox automatically using the previous 'search by site' method. I will use Chrome in this tutorial, but the core ideas of this should work on any browser that supports custom search engines.Firstly, go to your browser’s custom search engine management page. In Chrome, this is Settings → Search engine → Manage search engines.
Now click the ‘Add’ button and you will be shown this form:
The first field, currently focused and titled ‘Search engine’, is simply the name of the engine you are using. You can call it whatever you want.
Keyword lets you define a quick prefix you can use in the browser’s address bar to ‘select’ this search engine. (For example, your default engine might be set to Google, but if you type r Part then it will search whatever search engine has the keyword r for Part.)
Finally, the ‘URL with %s in place of query’ field lets you give an actual search engine URL like I described above. (See below for exactly how you may get this URL.)
Here’s an example of this filled out:
Getting the search engine URL
Firstly, you need to find the basic search URL for whatever normal search engine you are using to actually search Roblox. In the example, Google’s search URL is google.com/search?q=.
Next, we need to add %s… but wait, there’s more. Remember how we need to search by site? Well we also need to add that to the custom search engine (otherwise it would just be a normal Google search for the whole internet).
So, first we should add in the site:url part to the search: google.com/search?q=site:developer.roblox.com
Note that : is used in URLs to specify ports so this may cause issues. If this is a problem, you can substitute : for %3A, which is essentially a way to say : without literally saying it: google.com/search?q=site%3Adeveloper.roblox.com.
Once that is done, now we can add in the actual search term, along with a space to separate it from site:url: google.com/search?q=site:developer.roblox.com+%s
And there you have it, you’ve now got a custom search engine URL for the Roblox documentation. This method of course works with any search engine or website.
Happy searching 