Mike Southby

The install or upgrade of Microsoft Internet Explorer will give you the option to change your default search engine just as in previous versions of IE; of course for many this is going to involve a change from Bing to Google.  Now it may only be a minor point but after this initial choice their doesn’t seem to be an easy way of changing to a regional variant of Google using the Search Add-In menu, being that I live in the UK it seems a reasonable assumption that I am going to choose to change my default searching habits to UK searching – or at least have that choice.  Easy to do you’d have thought, alas not in IE!

After giving it some thought, the answer is actually quite easy, instead of using the menus within IE simply visit the webpage that was first seen at the beginning (of course most people will have gone straight past this screen and no longer have access to it), the webpage is:

http://www.microsoft.com/windows/ie/searchguide/en-en/default.mspx?dcsref=http://runonce.msn.com/runonce2.aspx

Here you will have the option to create your own search provider which is a lot easier than it sounds.  All you need to do is the following (using Google UK as a guide):

• Open a new tab in the browser (IE, of course), ensuring you leave the existing page open as you will need to come back shortly
• Visit the search engine that you want to be your default, in this case http://www.google.co.uk
• Perform a search for ‘TEST’ ensuring that you use all capital letters and that you check the UK option to return search results based on UK sites
• Copy and paste the URL of the page containing the search results into the box back on the ‘Add Search providers To Internet Explorer’ page
• Choose a name for this search provider, in this case Google UK
• Hit install

That’s it, simple.  Next time you use the search field in IE you’ll be presented with relevant sites.