ie Tip: IE keyword searching

[Denis W. Veteran]

One of the things I liked most about browsers like Chrome and Opera is the ability to type a keyword before a search term to determine what search engine to use. So for Opera, "g term" searches for "term" using Google, while "w term" does the same for Wikipedia. Chrome allows for the same thing but you need to hit TAB.

IE's official method is clumsy - click on a search provider button - but you can do keyword searching in IE, though it's hidden. I got this method from this article but their .reg template is broken. Here's a working template below:

Windows Registry Editor Version 5.00
[HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Internet Explorer\SearchUrl]
[HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Internet Explorer\SearchUrl\g]
@="http://www.google.ca/search?q=%s"
[HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Internet Explorer\SearchUrl\w]
@="http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Special:Search&search=%s"

Copy this into a .reg file - modify as needed - and merge into your registry.

[dysgenics]

if you use duckduckgo as a search engine, they have a gazillion bang syntaxes, is that the same thing?

[JoeC]

Side note - Chrome doesn't require you to hit tab, for me (both at work and on my home machine) it picks up my search keyword (eg. i for Google Images) after pressing space, so "i blue" searches Google Images for "blue" - same as Opera.

Another side note, yet another awesome feature which Opera were the first to do properly :p