This article will explain how to search on your favorite search engine using Windows Explorer. How do you Search anything on internet? You open a browser (Windows Internet Browser or Firefox or Chrome) and then you use either default search engine like BING (Windows Internet Search Engine) or Google or any other Search Engine of your choice.
Steps to Search using Windows Explorer (WIN 7 and above):
1. First you have to make the browser of your choice as default browser. For Firefox you can make it as default browser (options–>advanced) as shown in below screen-
Windows Internet explorer can be made default browser (Internet options–>Programs) as shown-
2. Now open Windows Explorer and type the search items in Address bar which you want to search as shown in below screen-
3. Hit enter and it will open default browser with search results. In my case default browser is Firefox-
4. As you can see the Search Engine used is BING to search the results. If you want Windows Explorer to use Search Engine of your choice then make the default search engine changes in Windows Internet Explorer. Go to Internet options–>Program–>”Manage Add Ons”–>Search Providers –>Select BING and uncheck “search in the address bar” box. This will stop BING as default search engine. Now you can add search engine of your choice by clicking link “Find more search providers” on the same screen. After adding new Search engine, Check the “search in the address bar” box for new search provider and make it default. Save the changes. In my example below I have chosen Google as my search engine.
5. Now again search the items in Address bar which you want to search and it will show results like this-
