There is definitely something missing in Internet Explorer 7. When I’m using Firefox, Opera, and Chrome, I have gotten used to highlighting a word or phrase, then right clicking and choosing a search engine to look it up. I noticed that it was missing in IE7 the other day, and I immediately set forth on a quest to fix this fault.
It didn’t take long to find the answer. Once again, an old acquaintance, Ramesh Srinivasan, had a solution handy at his WinHelpOnline website. The right-click-search (or context menu search) is fairly easy to add. Just follow my instructions below. (This should work in IE6 and IE7, but may not work IE8.)
- Download Google.zip from WinHelpOnline.
- Right click on the zip file and “Extract All” the files to a folder. (the Windows Desktop is a good spot)
- Open the folder and copy google.htm to the C:\Windows\Web folder.
- Double click on the google.reg file and click “Yes” to add this information into the registry.
- The next time you open up Internet Explorer, you’ll now be able to right click on a highlighted word and search for it.
- An “undo.reg” is included in the zip file, and you can run it if you want to remove the google search from your menu.
Wait! I’m not done with you yet. I can tell you how to add other search engines to the right click menu. I modified Ramesh’s code and created more search context actions. Thanks to Ramesh for permission to re-use his code.
Here are searches for:
- Ask.com
- Bing.com
- Dictionary.com
- FreewareWiki.com
- Scroogle.org
- Techie-Buzz.com
- Thesaurus.com
- Wikipedia.org
- Yahoo.com
To install these, just use the same instructions (2 through 6) above. Substitute the name of the site you are installing for “google”.
Note: IE8 already has a similar feature called “accelerators”. At this time, I don’t know how to write those.
Do you need any other websites added to this list? Let me know, when I have time I’ll add more.
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