Tip of the week: Using Accelerators

Today's post is courtesy of Ewan Dalton, who heads up the technology group within Microsoft UK’s partner business, and who also publishes a “Tip o’ the Week” to several thousand people, covering many aspects of productivity and technology. Previous tips are also published onto https://blogs.technet.com/ewan”

Internet Explorer 8 added a concept known as IE “Accelerators” – the principle being that you could select some text on a page, and using an accelerator, quickly search the web for that piece of text, or maybe do something more specific. The other day, I was talking to someone about a particular piece of kit, and we were looking at a website commenting on it. Looking for more info, I used one of the IE Accelerators to quickly Search with Bing , and he said, “wow – I didn’t know you could do that..?!”

There are a bunch of Accelerators built in with IE9 – the most obvious ones letting you select something on the page and immediately search Bing for the text you’ve selected. Even handier, is select a post code or place name and Map with Bing to view the map straight away, all without need to re-key everything.

There are other accelerators available – if you’ve got more than one Search provider (other search engines, apparently, are available) then they’ll show up in the “All Accelerators-> ” flyout menu, and under the Manage Accelerators option on the same menu, you can find more or deal with the ones you currently have.

Take a closer look at Windows Internet Explorer 9 and see what else you can do!