Tip: Search with Internet Explorer 9 (IE9)

I would like to share some tips on searching with IE9.

1) Pressing Ctrl+E moved the caret to the address bar following a “? “. Entering a search term and pressing Enter passed the search criteria to the search provider you specified (the default is Bing of course).

You have to make sure the following option is enabled:

Internet Options | General | Search, checking “Search in the address bar”

You can manage the search provider by going to:

Internet Options | General | Search, clicking "Find more search providers..." to add more.

2) Sometimes System administrators may have legitimate reasons to block search in the address bar. In this case, you can still get it through the custom SearchURL feature (which requires that you manually modify your registry). For example, if you set
[HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Internet Explorer\SearchUrl\b]
@="https://www.bing.com/search?q=%s"
then you can query Bing by typing “b <query>” into the address bar. This still works with “Search in the address bar” disabled.

And you can also search in the explorer address bar:

And in the taskbar:

More information:

You can also set more SearchURL, for example:

[HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Internet Explorer\SearchUrl\MSKB]@="https://support.microsoft.com/?kbid=%s"

[HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Internet Explorer\SearchUrl\MSN]@="https://search.msn.com/results.asp?q=%s"