Pin Any search site to Start menu and Windows Explorer

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When you search for anything on your computer and don’t find it there, most of the time you search for it in your favorite search engine. This is a common activity that I have seen many of my teammates when they failed to find on the local server.

Though Windows 7 comes with Federated search this policy of Windows 7 and Windows 2008 lets a system admin add an internet site like google bing or even their intranet sites right below two places

  • Start Menu (Appears when you search)
  • In Windows Explorer at the end where it says “Search again in “
Pin Any search site to Start menu and Windows Explorer
Pin Any search site to Start menu and Windows Explorer

As soon as you click on it, the search will be launched in that specific page in your default browser.

How to Pin Any search site to Start menu and Windows Explorer

  • Go to Group Policy Editor
  • Navigate to Computer Configuration\Administrative Templates\Windows Components\Windows Explorer
  • Look for a policy starting with “Pin Internet sites….”
  • Enable it and you can add 5 such sites but they should have the URL of the search site in OpenSearch format with {searchTerms} for the query string (such as http://www.example.com/results.aspx?q={searchTerms}).
Pin Any search site to Start menu and Windows Explorer
Pin Any search site to the Start menu and Windows Explorer

Advantages of this :

  • Regular users can configure their favorite and trusted sites to search.
  • For IT and Corporate, you can include your intranet sites with this.

1 COMMENT

  1. Thank you very much for this tip. This is exactly what I was looking for for a long time. I would love to use this.
    However, it doesn’t work for me. I am admin on my PC (win7 Pro, clean install). I could set other Group Policy settings without problem like “Add search Internet link to Start Menu”, but even if I set it up e.g. for Google {searchTerms} ), these options do not appear in my Start Menu options.
    Can you tell me what other setting should have an influence on this, please.
    Thank you in advance.
    Gabor

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