Custom Searching in IE, Via SearchURL Registry Entry

Original date: May 2, 2006 1:45 AM by sonnik

IE has a pretty cool and often overlooked feature for quick searching. Check out "HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Internet Explorer\SearchUrl". This is a collection of keys that may save you some page visits allowing you to go directly to your results.

I'm someone who plays World of Warcraft (WoW), and the game is so complex you may often want to look at third party web sites for maps and information like location of goods and services in game. Read on to learn how to make your own, or download a sample that allows you to search popular WoW helper site "Thottbot".

Here's an illustration of how "Regedit.exe" lists this key:

Generally, when you're using the search feature of many web sites - you'll notice your URL in your address bar indicates the content of your search. This Internet Explorer feature just allows for quickly creating a "Search URL"; this way you can bypass the initial search screen at the web site in question. You'll see in the illustration that some characters are substituted with hexadecimal character codes, as these characters are not legal in URL syntax.

If you'd like to download the Thottbot sample, click here. To apply it, or "merge" it, simply right click on the uncompressed file and select the appropriate option. Note that this can be a very insecure practice, but luckily with files with the ".reg" extension, you can simply view the contents in a standard text editor such as Notepad.

Afterwards, you'll be able to enter your abbreviated search instruction, as illustrated here:

Note that Internet Explorer may hover a drop-down that offers to "Search Thott XXXXX"; this can be ignored. After you press Enter, you'll be quickly presented with your search results:

If I recall correctly, this was introduced in Internet Explorer 5 - actually with a set of IE Tweaks you could download from Microsoft. The functionality carried over into Version 6, though I don't know if it still exists in the Beta of Version 7.

I'd also recommend creating a search string for a website like Wikipedia. I'm sure Firefox has some similar functionality, but I don't know how to utilize it.