BizzyBee’s BizzyThoughts

Use the IE7 search field to search Notes.net

If you’re into Notes, you probably use Notes.net a lot as a knowledge resource. I call it “Notes.net” because that what it used to be, but it IBM redirects it to http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/lotus. I’m not the only one that cannot remember that, and I’m sure a lot of us just keep typing www.notes.net :-).

Anyway, even if you add the site to your favorites, it’s not like it’s “right under your fingers” to search the forums, and that’s what we actually want, no? You have a problem, and you want to find the solution within seconds.

Now since Internet Explorer 7, we have a search field in the upper right corner that allows us to search msn (the default) or Google or any other search engine listed.

Wouldn’t it be cool if we could use the IE7 search bar to search notes.net?

Ok, here is how you can do this:

1. Click the magnifying glass on the right of the search field and select Find More Providers.
   
2. Go to a Notes.net forum in another browser window and do a search for the word TEST. Then copy the url in the address field of your browser. In my example, I used the Notes/Domino 6 and 7 Forum. In that case, this is the url to copy: http://www-10.lotus.com/ldd/nd6forum.nsf/Search?SearchView&_ Query=TEST&SearchOrder=0&Start=1&Count=100
   (be careful, I used the _ to split it on 2 lines, so remove it after copy).
   If you’re familiar with the search syntax for a Notes webview, you can even customise this a little. F.e. you could set Count=200 (showing more results at once).
3. Go to the Find More Providers window in your browser and in the Create Your Own section paste the url in the url field as shown.
   .
   In the other field you can name the search provider (I typed Notes.Net)
4. Click the Install button, the confirm with Add Provider (optionally make it your default search provider) and that’s it!
   

That’s it! From now on it only takes seconds to do a Notes.net search. By the way, all the existing syntax rules still work (like the use of the AND and OR words).

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3 Responses to “Use the IE7 search field to search Notes.net”

1. Nasir Javed says:
   October 5th, 2007 at 11:46 am

   Nice Tip (Y)

2. martin.vereecken says:
   October 5th, 2007 at 12:59 pm

   Thank you! I’m also researching the possibility to get this working in Firefox as well.

3. BizzyThoughts » Blog Archive » Adding Notes.Net to I7 and Firefox searchbar in 2 clicks says:
   October 6th, 2007 at 11:55 pm

   […] day after I discussed how to manually add this for IE7, I figured out how to do this automatically. So, because you’re all lazy, here […]

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