One of the new features you’ll notice in Windows Internet Explorer 7 is the search box which allows you to search directly from the browser without going to the search engine’s homepage or installing a toolbar. By default, the search box lets you choose from five search engines: AOL search, Ask Jeeves, Google, MSN, and Yahoo! But the search box is basic and, currently, it doesn’t make it easy for users to add other search engines to the list. This might change when Internet Explorer 7 is completed but if you can’t wait for the final version, you can add your favourite search engines to the search box from the registry. I’m going to add Google News search for example.

Before I start, I must warn you that the registry is a crucial part of your system and messing around with it is dangerous. Although it can’t set off some nuclear reaction, improper use of the registry can severely damage your system. So, I only recommend registry hacks if you’re familiar with the registry or at least able to follow my instructions carefully.

Open Registry Editor:
Click start | Click Run… | Type regedit | Press Enter

Navigate to the following key:
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Internet Explorer\SearchScopes

In SearchScopes, you should see the five search engines unless you’ve removed any of them. To add another search engine, create a new key and give it the same name of the search engine which, in my case, would be Google News. This key you’ve created will contain information about the search engine you want to add.

Inside the new key, create a string value and name it DisplayName. Change its value data to the name of the search engine (e.g. Google News).

Create another string value and name it URL. The value data will be the URL of the search query using %s to represent the search keyword. e.g. http://news.google.com/news?hl=en&ne…

If you don’t know what the URL for your search engine is, simply go to that search engine and search for anything you like. Then copy the URL from the address bar, paste it as the value data of the string value and replace the search keywords with %s.

The last step is to create a DWORD value called SortIndex. As you might’ve guessed, this value is used to control the order of the search engines. Change its value data to the position you want, for example 5 (numbering starts from 0). If you want to place your favourite search engine at the top, change SortIndex to 0 and make sure none of the other search engines has the same value.

Now restart Internet Explorer. You should see the new search engine added to the list. To set it as the default search engine, click the magnifying glass icon beside the search box and go to search settings. From there, you can set the default search engine for your browser.

If you have any questions or comments regarding this article, please don’t hesitate to let me know. And if you’re interested, more of my writing can be found here.