Lately, I've been using Google Chrome as my default browser to see if I can get used to it. I always considered myself very productive using Firefox, and I've heard so many good things about Chrome that I decided to give it a try. The features that I relied the most on Firefox were the Firebug plugin and searching Lotus Connections directly from the browser. Searching Lotus Connections directly from Firefox was possible thanks to OpenSearch which Lotus Connections supports since v2.5.
Google Chrome comes with a Firebug-like capability already built-in so that was easy. My next priority was setting up Chrome to search Lotus Connections instead of Google ( we all know at this point that Connections is a better search engine than Google, right?). Everywhere I looked, it said that Chrome supports OpenSearch. I couldn't, however, figure out how to add Lotus Connections to Chrome via OpenSearch. 
Luckily, there's a way to do it manually (this is how I did it in my Mac. It may be a bit different in Windows):
- Open Chrome
- Go to Preferences...
- Under Basics, you'll see Default Search set to Google. Click on Manage
- Click on the + sign to add a new search engine
- Set the Name to Lotus Connections, the Keyword to lc and the URL to https://<hostname>/search/web/search?query=%s (for example: https://w3.ibm.com/connections/search/web/search?query=%s). It should look like this:
- Click Ok
- Optional: Select it and click on Make Default
- Close the Preferences panel.
If you didn't set Lotus Connections as your default search engine, here's what you do. Say you want to search for "enterprise2.0 software". In Chrome's omnibox, type "lc enterprise2.0 software" (w/out the quotes) and press Enter. And voilá, you've now searched Lotus Connections directly from the browser without needing to open Connections first and logging in.
Enjoy!