These are a couple of example desktop files on how to launch a browser search - completely launcher independent.

Just copy the .desktop files to ~/.local/share/applications/.

In case Chromium is /not/ your default browser you need to modify all the .desktop files according to your setup. Here is a quick example on to do this:

sed -i 's/chromium/firefox/g' ~/.local/share/applications/Search_*.desktop

Of course I could have just used something like xdg-open, but I just don't feel like installing a package for this :]

Basically just copy any .desktop file and Modify it.

• Name= entry is the shortcut you want to assign to the specific engine.
  • IMPORTANT: you /should always/ add a space (e.g. "g ") behind said engine shortcut. Otherwise some (all?) launchers might launch different shortcuts in some cases. Reason: Spaces between a shortcut and the search query are /not/ mandatory. In other words: "gfoobar" would launch the "g" shortcut with the query "foobar" if both "g" and "gi" (/without/ trailing spaces) are registered as shortcuts, "gi foobar" would be equivalent to "g i foobar" and the actual "gi" shortcut would be entirely inaccessible.
• Comment= is optional
• Exec= is the actual command that gets launched. %U herein is substituted by everything other than the shortcut (Name=).

Type "g I hate it when" into your application launcher to initiate a Google search.