The Internet Explorer Web Accesories (available on this Microsoft page) includes an awesome, but little known, feature called QuickSearch. It lets you type special shortcuts in the address bar. For example, to do an AltaVista search for dogboy, you can just type 'av dogboy' in the address bar. It will automatically do the search for you and bring up the result page.
The coolest thing about QuickSearch is that you can customize the entries. You can do this by opening up "QuickSearch.exe", in the Media folder of your Favorites (after the aforementioned Web Accessories are installed).
You can define new entries based off a Custom URL. Below are some that I created that I use all the time.
| Name | Shortcut | Custom URL | Example |
|---|---|---|---|
|
Google Search
|
g
|
http://www.google.com/search?q=%s | g dogboy |
|
Dictionary.com Lookup
|
d
|
http://www.dictionary.com/cgi-bin/dict.pl?term=%s | d analgesic |
|
Thesauraus.com Lookup
|
th
|
http://www.thesaurus.com/cgi-bin/search?config=roget&words=%s |
th synonym |
|
WHOIS Lookup
|
whois
|
http://www.netsol.com/cgi-bin/whois/whois?STRING=%s&SearchType=do | whois dogboy.org |
|
Yahoo Quote
|
yq
|
http://quote.yahoo.com/q?s=%s&d=t | yq IMMR |
You can automatically install these shortcuts by running this registry file.