search bar

[JD]

Hi,

Firefox has a nice feature called "search bar". It sits besides the
address bar. Firefox feeds what you type in the search bar to your
default search engine. I know you can type in the address bar in IE.
If what you type is not a URL then a default search engine will kick in.
However, IE normally takes a while before knowing the content just
typed is not a URL. Is there any existing IE feature or a 3rd party
addon that can do the same thing? Your help is appreciated.

JD

 

[Jon Kennedy]

If Google is your favorite search engine, you can add the Google toolbar -
http://toolbar.google.com/T4/index_xp.html. You can customize it to just
show the search box and then position it anywhere in IE's toolbar area.

Then there is http://www.groowe.com/ - a search toolbar that combines many
into one and is highly customizable.

Finally, there this clean little one -
http://www.searchbarpro.com/features.asp If you want to search from the rt.
click context menu in IE as well, install the "add-on".

 

[Rob ^_^]

Hi JD and Jon,

There are also Address bar search shortcuts(technically known as SearchURLs)
that is a little known feature of IE(including v7). I have a listing at
http://www.iecustomizer.com/?url=iesearches/

They work like Yahoo toolbar shortcuts (actually IE had them well before
Yahoo) where you assign a shortcut keyword (say 'g' for Google) and when
installed you can search from your address bar (IE and Task bar) just using
the search keyword, followed by a space and then the search terms.

Thus in the example to search google for "IE7" you would type in
g IE7

in your address bar and the search terms would be passed to the Google
search engine and the results displayed in the browser.

In my listing you can change the keywords that I have chosen to your own
choice. Just type in your keyword value and then select the Reg file
download button (this will prompt to download the *.reg file that you can
then run to install the required registry entries.

Regards.

 

[Jon Kennedy]

Yes, I should have also mentioned you can search from IE's address bar in a
faster way than using Autoscan - it's called Autosearch using the "?" prefix
as Rob mentioned:


How to Search the Internet from the Address Bar in Internet Explorer
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/221754/EN-US/
How to change the default AutoSearch search page
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/198279/EN-US/

The second article doesn't mention Google, but the default reg value would
be
http://www.google.com/search?q=%s
And there's a second REG_SZ entry with the name "provider" and the data
value "gogl" (no quotes on either).