Coding Lifestyle

IE Google.IE Accelerator (Search Provider) August 31, 2009

This was starting to really annoy me and was very quick to fix once I spent 5 minutes to solve it.  The problem is, the default Google search provider for IE kept bringing me to google.co.uk.  Say I’m shopping and find an ebay listing.  Since I’m on google.co.uk I get taken to ebay.co.uk.  I really wanted to stick with google.ie and the Irish-centric listings it returns.  The problem is there is no way to edit the search provider so the best I could do was install a google.com (vs. google.co.uk) provider.

It turns out this is simple to fix with a quick edit to the registry.  The search providers are stored here: HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Internet Explorer\SearchScopes

The GUIDs may differ, mine was {6A1806CD-94D4-4689-BA73-E35EA1EA9990} for the google.com search provider.

Open the URL key and simply change  www.google.com to www.google.ie: http://www.google.ie/search?q={searchTerms}&rls=com.microsoft:{language}:{referrer:source?}&ie={inputEncoding}&oe={outputEncoding}&sourceid=ie7&client=&rlz=1I7GGLL_en

Now when I search (CTRL-E), I get google.ie with all the creamy Irish goodness I expect.