Bottom Line: Here’s a quick and easy way to search your Google Contacts from the Chrome Omnibox (address bar).

I hate losing people’s contact information, but I also hate having a cluttered and bloated contact list. My solution for years now is to keep my “active” contacts on my iPhone, and a separate archive of all contacts in Google Contacts. I don’t sync my Google Contacts to my devices, it basically just acts as a backup.

I have a script on my Mac that runs once a month that exports all my contacts from Address Book / Contacts into a .vcf card and opens up Google Contacts, so the next time I open my computer, I import the .vcf card, delete the “import group” that’s automatically created, and Merge Duplicates.

Every once in a while, I get a text or miss a call from an unknown number on my iPhone. My system makes it really easy to just search for that number (or part of it — I usually just do the last 4 digits) in my Google Contacts, and in just a few seconds I can verify whether or not it’s someone whose number I’ve ever known. At least in the last decade or so.

To make this even easier, I turned it into a Chrome Custom Search for the Omnibox. Here’s how to do it on a Mac (likely similar on a PC).

  1. Right click on the address bar -> Edit Search Engines...
  2. Enter the following:
Name Keyword URL
Google Contacts Contacts https://contacts.google.com/search/%s


NB: Many thanks to Stephen Meech for notifying me of the updated URL. The URL for the old version of contacts was: https://www.google.com/contacts/u/0/#contacts/search/%s

Test it out by typing in the Omnibox: contacts ⇥ <the number>