Right, someone trying to convince me why Firefox is so much better than IE brought up the issue of being able to type "google searchterm" into his Adress bar and immediately being taken to the site.

Well, here's some news: IE can do that to, along with imdb, whois, vandale, php and everything else that uses parameters as query terms.

How? Look at this registry key and see the light:

[HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Internet Explorer\SearchUrl\google]
@="http://www.google.com/search?q=%s"
" "="+"
"%"="%25"
"&"="%26"
"+"="%2B"

%s is where your search term comes, and the name of the key is the prefix.

Another example to get the hang of it:

[HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Internet Explorer\SearchUrl\imdb]
@="http://us.imdb.com/Find?%s"
" "="+"
"%"="%25"
"&;"="%26"
"+"="%2B"

Got it? Sweet, enjoy your new IE power! ;)

I have uploaded a .reg file which contains altavista, astalavista, cd, download, google, googlenl, imdb, php, sub, vandale, vcd, whois and lucky as search terms. Feel free to invent more :)


Update: Google feeling lucky keyword.

[HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Internet Explorer\SearchUrl\lucky]
@="http://www.google.com/search?q=%s&btnI=I%27m+Feeling+Lucky"
" "="+"
"%"="%25"
"&"="%26"
+"="%2B"