Users look for all kinds of information on Internet. In general, information is searched by opening up a search engine and passing the desired arguments. Internet Explorer 6.0 and above have a new feature called Address Bar Search. This setting enables you to search for information in a search engine, entered directly in Internet Explorer address bar.

If you have a search engine service you use a lot, you can create a shortcut to that service. For example, most people use Google to search the Internet, and Google uses a standard address format to search for things, so you can cut short that format into keywords and arguments. The address format Google uses is - http://www.google.com/search?q=%s.

You can define a keyword “g”, representing Google as your search engine, plus “registry hacks” as the argument that it should search. You enter “g registry hacks” in the Internet Explorer address bar, and then Google comes up with the results page for the words “registry” and “hacks”. “%s” in the above URL refers to the arguments passed with keyword “g” in address bar. Similarly, you can create shortcuts for many other search services frequently used. This saves time when you do research on the Web.

For this, go to Start > Run menu, enter “regedit” and navigate to the registry path listed below. Create a subkey with the keyword name you'd like to type in the address bar to access the engine, say “g” for Google in the above example. Now, right-click and modify the “Default” value of newly created subkey with the engine’s address format URL (“http://www.google.com/search?q=%s” in our case).

Refresh view of your computer for the changes to take effect.

NOTE:
Other usable search services:

Abbreviations Search URLs
gg (Google Groups) http://groups.google.com/groups?lnk=hpsg&q=%s
a (Alta Vista) http://www.altavista.com/q?q=%s
d (Dictionary) http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/%s