An improved Search Bar on your page: you asked, we delivered!
The improved Search Bar is a prominent feature on every start page. For a good reason. First, you can use it to do a custom search on Google. But did you know you can use it to search your bookmarks? Now, at the request of many of our users, you can use it to search in your descriptions too. This is how, and why it matters.
Our Search Bar: many functions together

In the redesign of our site we presented last year, we prominently featured the Search Bar. We added several useful features to it, including a Google Custom Search you can use to add Google results quickly to your start page. We added Yahoo and Bing support. Besides this, we made it possible to add as many custom search engines you prefer, including search functions from other websites, like Merriam Webster. In fact, we liked our Search Bar so much that we turned it into a wholly separate Search widget.
An improved Search Bar
In sum: we wanted our Search Bar to be a functional, useful addition to your start page. We also think we’ve succeeded in doing just that. Even more: we believe this Search bar is one of the reasons why there’s nothing like our product on the market. Especially for power-users, with significant collections of bookmarks, RSS-feeds, and other widgets.
And now, the search box is even more useful. We added the functionality to search more than just bookmark titles. Today your search will also return results from the description of any bookmark. And these descriptions are entirely personal. There are several use cases for this new feature:
- Add custom tags or labels to your bookmarks, for quick filtering.
- Locate bookmarks in all your pages at once.
- Multi-label support.
Improve your descriptions
To add a new description or to change a current description, locate the bookmark in your bookmark widget. Right-click the bookmark, and select Edit from the context menu.
In the Edit bookmark pane, you can locate the Description field, and start typing away. Markup is fully supported.
What do you think?
So, that’s it for this time. We hope you like this new addition to your Search Bar functionality. We plan to keep on improving it, of course. We’re thinking about these improvements:
- Make it easier to add new search engines.
- Make it possible to search in Widget titles too.
- Add advanced filtering or search options.
Which of these improvements should we tackle next time? Please let us know what you think. We’d also love to get other improvement suggestions, to don’t hesitate to comment.
Thanks in advance!
8 Replies to “An improved Search Bar on your page: you asked, we delivered!”
I’ve been using start.me for several years with Opera & now Vivaldi browsers and personally speaking I definitely do not like this new look especially since I was given NO warning it was coming; it also messed up (being polite) the Vivaldi browser… If something’s not broken don’t try and fix it…
Hi, thanks for commenting. We’re sorry to hear that you don’t like our new design, and we appreciate your input. So, could you be more specific about the changes you don’t like? Also, you say that you wanted to be warned before the big change was made. You’re correct here: we don’t usually warn our users, even though we publish our changes in a blog, where anyone can comment. And, there’s always our support team. You can reach them by sending an email to support@start.me, for example, to tell us more about your problem with Vivaldi. We’d love to help you out or investigate further. At any rate, we hope you continue to enjoy our product, as we’re still in the business to make your online life a bit more efficient. Thanks again for reaching out!
Really love it! So convenient to be able to find bookmarks this way. Some websites simply have impossible names. Being able to search in descriptions (I myself provided) helps a lot. Great job!
Thanks a lot, Michiel!
Hi, it is a great feature to search bookmarks, but there are only 5 results. Where can i find all search results (search bookmarks)?
Hi! I hadn’t noticed this limitation yet, thanks for mentioning it. I’ll check with the DevTeam to see what’s up there and if we could change it. We’ll inform you through our blog and Twitter feed. If you’d like to be informed personally, please drop us a line at support@start.me. Thanks for your reaction!
Thank you for the change 😉
You’re very welcome! And also, we’re working hard to improve the search bar even more. Stay tuned for some more good news!