Search fast !, Search smart !!

What do you do when you need to find an information, software, image or any other data you need?. The answer may be similar like googling or yahooing (meaning searching in the Internet through google, yahoo or any other popular search engines.

But, what do you do to search something from any of those search engines?, well naturally first you will open the Internet Explorer, and type www.google.com or www. yahoo.com. And when the specific page loads, you will again type the key words and hit Enter or click on "Go" button and wait for the search engine to find the needed information.

Though you may have been habitual of these process, but there are more smart way to find anything or everything just in a single click.

In this page I am going to describe a simple registry tweak that will give you extra power to search;

You can save time with this tweak, that allows you to specify the search engine to query by typing a request directly into the Internet Explorer address bar from any open pages.

To make your browser smart, first you need to make following edits in your registry:

If you are not familiar with registry, do not panic, just Click on Start>>Run and type "regedit" (without the quote) and hit Enter.

Now expand the HKEY_CURRENT_USER and go to: Software>>Microsoft>>Internet Explorer>>SearchUrl

Here, you can create some of your favorite search engine's specific keys; so let us start with google:

To be able to search anything using google search engine directly from your browsers address bar; follow this:

1. Open you registry and find the key HKEY_CURRENT_USER>> Software>> Microsoft>> Internet Explorer>>SearchUrl
2. Now create a new sub key by right click on the key "searchUrl" and going to New>> Key.
3. Just name the new key 'g' (just change the default name "New Key #1" to 'g', without the quotes)
4. Remember that, later, whenever you type 'g' (without quote) in your address bar it will activate the google search engine.
5. Finally, open the new sub key (the 'g' key) and double click the Default string value at the right pane, and fill the value data with: http://www.google.com/search?q=%s and click "OK".

Just restart your Internet Explorer. Now, if you want to search anything using google search engine, just type g give a space and type the key words, the google search engine will be activated and in a second you will get page results of your keywords in your open window.

For example, if you want to search "Buddha", just type g buddha (it is g space buddha) in the address bar and hit the Enter key, that's it, easy and smart.

To use different search engine you can create several sub key under the "SearchUrl" key:

The key combination and url details are as follows:

For Yahoo, create a sub key called 'y', and fill the default value data with: http://search.yahoo.com/bin/search?p=%s (later, type y space keywords to search using yahoo)

For searching images in Flickr, create a key called 'f', and fill the default value data with: http://www.flickr.com/search/?q=%s (later, type f space keywords to search images using flickr)

For searching images using yahoo; create a key called 'yi', and fill the default value data with:http://images.search.yahoo.com/search/images?p=%s(later, type yi space keywords to search images using yahoo)

For searching images using google; create a key called 'gi', and fill the default value data with: http://images.google.com/images?hl=en&q=%s (later, type gi space keywords to search images using google)

The above mentioned sub key names (such as 'g', 'y', 'yi') can be changed or modified as per the users choice, but the same alphabets, as per the key name must be typed before the keywords to activate and search through the specific search engine.

Search smart and enjoy!