Does the Internet Explorer Address Bar have any hidden talents?
A:
Well, it can’t juggle or anything, but here’s something you may not have known.
It’s getting to the point where Internet Explorer does Web searches all by itself. Almost. You probably already know that you can search the Web from the search box, and even from the web page with Accelerators. Now you can search from the URL Address bar.
Open up Internet Explorer 8 and press Alt-D to enter text in the Address bar. But instead of entering a URL, type “? canoodle,” and then press Enter. Internet Explorer will call up your default search provider to hunt down the Web’s top “canoodle” references — just as if you’d done the search from the search box. (You can pick your own search term; I just like “canoodle.”)
Figure 1: Search with the Address bar
If you don’t want to search from the current tab, press Alt-Enter instead of Enter after you enter your search term (i.e. “canoodle” ). IE will open up a new tab to show the search results.
Another option for doing the search from the Address bar is to type “Go canoodle,” or “Find canoodle,” instead of using the question mark. Go ahead, type those extra characters, but I’m sticking with the quicker question mark.
~Darrin Koltow
