^[1] 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.)

1. Download Google.zip from WinHelpOnline ^[2].
2. Right click on the zip file and Extract Allthe files to a folder. (the Windows Desktop is a good spot)
3. Open the folder and copy google.htm to the C:WindowsWeb folder.
4. Double click on the google.reg file and click Yesto add this information into the registry.
5. The next time you open up Internet Explorer, you’ll now be able to right click on a highlighted word and search for it.
6. An undo.regis included in the zip file, and you can run it if you want to remove the google search from your menu.

^[3]

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 ^[4]
• Bing.com ^[5]
• Dictionary.com ^[6]
• FreewareWiki.com ^[7]
• Scroogle.org ^[8]
• Techie-Buzz.com ^[9]
• Thesaurus.com ^[10]
• Wikipedia.org ^[11]
• Yahoo.com ^[12]

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.