Adding Sharepoint search to IE7 search drop down

Just discovered this cool feature in IE7 that you can add custom search providers.

Mark Harrison originally posted some reg hacking on how to this. You can also do it from the front end of IE7.

For example if you want to add a people search from your Sharepoint 2007 corporate portal. Browse to the portal and run a people search with the criteria of ‘TEST’. Then copy the URL of the results page. Next click on the search drop down in IE and select ‘Find more providers..’

On this page copy in the URL of the results page and give it some display name ‘eg Corporate People Search’.

The power of this is that your users can now directly launch and people search from IE7 without having to first browsing to the sharepoint site.

Now combine this with the registry hack that Mark Harrison posted you can now roll this out to all your users.