jameslee

The original XP PowerToys allow customized searching via the Internet Explorer (IE) address bar, which will work with any site that uses the Get method to submit your input. I've come to love this feature and use it constantly when i'm surfing the web.

Example: Google

Manually entering "Apex Rules" from the Google's main page, www.google.com, directs you to the URL "http://www.google.com/search?q=Apex+Rules". As you can see, the input "Apex Rules" appears in plain text in the address bar.

You can use PowerToys' TweakUI (TweakUI -> Internet Explorer -> Search) to automatically replace "http://www.google.com/search?q=" with whatever you choose, for example the letter "g". Thus, you can search Google simply by typing "g term1 term2 term3" in the address bar, where the 'termN' represents the word(s) you'd like to search.

I've setup these shortcuts with most of the sites i search daily:

. Google, for general infomation
. Yahoo!, for corporate entities
. Cambridge Dictionaries Online, becuase my spellling sucs
. Weather, because i'm in multiple zip codes during the week
. Astalavista, for security information

It's so much faster to type "y UltraMon" in the addressbar than to type "www.yahoo.com", wait for the page to load, select the textbox from the page, type "UltraMon", and click the Search button.

Unfortunately, this feature doesn't work with these popular sites because they don't use the Get method:

. IMDB
. CDNOW

Although i haven't tried it, since the address bar also exists in all Explorer windows, i don't see why you couldn't create shortcuts to access resources like network drives by replacing "\\Server\Folder1\Folder2" with "s" and then only entering "s" along with the remaining relative path in the address bar to access the desired resource.

If you haven't already, you should check this out. Also, since Microsoft is updating the PowerToys and in case this feature gets removed from the next version, does anyone know of any other software that does the same thing?

James

Note: Microsoft removed the PowerToys for XP from their site until the new version is released in April. You can still get the original XP PowerToys from other online resources, and if all else fails i have a copy.