BytesWired

On my previous post, I already showed you how to create your own search plugin for Firefox and IE. I hope you didn’t mess up your PC. Well, are you ready for more hacks?

Ok, we know there are a few ways to search in IE. The common ways are:

• using address bar
  • you type in the full address and hit Enter.
• search text box (located on top right)
  • you select which search plugin you want to use, type in keywords and hit Enter.

These 2 are preset search features available on all IE. The downside of the first option is that you need to key in full address and quite troublesome (assuming no history url being cached). The second one is better option because you can select which search engine plugin to use and can just type in what you want to search. However, if you have lots of search engine plugins, you may find yourself spending time switching between different search engine plugins.

This short tutorial will show you how you can speed up your search activities by modifying some registry keys. Once done, you can start searching from address bar by entering a customized key follow by your search text. It will definitely makes it so much easier for you to search.

Hacking Registry

This following hack require changing registry keys and as you know it, if you do not know how and mess up registry keys, well, your PC might stop working completely. As usual, before I proceed and show you how to hack it, just have to tell you this…

** do it at your own risk!! **

Let’s proceed, shall we? To make it simple for you, just follow these steps below:

1. Open your registry editor. (Click Start-> Run. Type regedit and hit Enter)
2. Go to HKCU\Software\Microsoft\Internet Explorer\SearchURL
3. Create new key (right click and select New->Key)
4. Enter a unique name. For this example, I am using BW (read: BytesWired).
5. Perform the following
   1. You will see a (Default) string on the key. This will be your web site search query URL. For example, my weblog search query is
      • http://www.byteswired.com?s=
      • However, you need to add %s at the end of the url. Thus creating a final URL as http://www.byteswired.com?s=%s. The %s is the keyword to represent your search text.
   2. Create new string values of :
      • (space) = +
      • % = %25
      • & = %26
      • + = %2B
      • refer screenshot below for more details.
   3. What the 4 new string values do is to convert those characters ([space], %, & and +) to appropriate character so that IE can parse and understand it.
6. Close the registry editor.
7. Restart IE.
8. Now, on your address bar, you enter “BW search plugins” and hit Enter.
9. Look at how IE parse your string. It will show http://www.byteswired.com?s=search+plugin and open the site automatically.
10. Cool eh. Wait a minute. Take a look at the string. Why is there a ‘+’ between ’search’ and ‘plugin’? Remember that we created string value earlier to replace space with ‘+’ in the registry? It does make sense now, doesn’t it.
11. Now, you already know how it is done, try it yourself. For a start, you can try create for searching photos in Flickr. The search query is http://www.flickr.com/search/?q=

Share Your Hacks

Now you have created your own hacks, you can easily share it with your friends by exporting the hacks from registry.

To export registry, you select the key folder of your hacks, right click and select Export, to export all keys and values to a flat file on screenshot below. You can then email this file to your friends or simply host it on your web server.

Installing this hack on PC is really simple. Just double-click on the file or select Merge option when you right click the file.

** You may need Administrator or special rights to modify registry keys on your PC. **

Having Problems?

Let me know if you successfully create one yourself. Drop me any comments if you have any.

Share this post with your friends if you find it useful.
[tags]IE Address Bar, Hack, Internet Explorer[/tags]

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This entry was posted on Sunday, September 9th, 2007 at 9:40 am and is filed under General, Internet Explorer, Tips and Tricks. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.