Question

I am currently playing around with chrome extensions. I would like to catch google search parameters (i.e. the keyword query) and use them to display other stuff as the evernote extension does.

Does anybody have an idea how they implemented it?

Have been looking at the source code for quite a while now and couldn’t find anything.

Answer 1

Well the search term is the q parameter of the search url, so in a background page you could monitor tabs and then use parseUri (http://blog.stevenlevithan.com/archives/parseuri) to parse the url and get q.
Something like this…
background.js

// make sure you include the parseUri listed above
chrome.tabs.onUpdated.addListener(function(tabId, changeInfo, tab) 
    {
        uri = parseUri(tab.url);
        if ((uri.host.indexOf('google')!=-1)&&(uri.path=='/search')){
            // do something with the search term
            console.debug('Search term was : ' + unescape(uri.queryKey.q));
        }

    });