I've seen a spike recently in references to both Google's deskbar and the multi-site alternative, Dave's Quick Search Taskbar Toolbar Deskbar.  In case you haven't stumbled across these particular pieces of technology, they both allow you to place a web-search box onto your taskbar as a new toolbar.  It's definitely one of those useful little widgets that you can't live without once you've got it.

However, I'm here to tell you that you probably don't need to download and install anything else to make this happen... probably.  The catch is that you do need to have TweakUI (XP / Win95-2000) installed.  I always install TweakUI as part of my base build, so this wasn't a big deal for me.  You also need to have the “Address“ toolbar enabled.  I've got my taskbar set to double-tall at the bottom, with the Quick-Launch and Address toolbars on top, with my running programs on the bottom.  I like having the Address bar there, since I'm constantly firing up a browser for one thing or another.

Anyway, once you've got TweakUI installed (or already do) and have the Address tollbar enabled, follow these steps:

• Fire up TweakUI, expand the IE branch, and click on “Search“.
• Create a new entry, enter a prefix (for now, let's say Google), and in the URL, subsitute “%s“ for the search terms in a Google URL, i.e. http://www.google.com/search?sourceid=navclient&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8&q=%s
• OK, OK, and you're done.

Now, you just type “google StuffI'mSearchingFor” in the Address toolbar, and up pops Google with your results.  I've got other prefixes set for mskb, Google Groups, and MSDN... I use all of them almost daily.  It'll work for any other search engine of course.  Just run some test search, replace the search terms with “%s”, and off you go.

Enjoy.

- G