When I had Internet Explorer 6 running, I had my homepage set to www.google.co.uk because I’m from England and like to have the option of searching pages from the UK or from the world. However I discovered when I installed IE7 that the search bar directly next to the address bar has the Google Search funtion in it, however it by default searches www.google.com and I just plainly didn’t want it.

I found a workaround 😉 Now you can use the Search bar up in IE7 to search the pages of where you live. So, if Jabez wants to search Malasia’s pages, he can type in anything he wants and he has the option to do that. If Squire wants to search New Zealands Google, he can do! 🙂

Note: this is only for users of Internet Explorer 7 – it won’t work on any other browser 🙂 I cannot accept any responsibility from any damage this may cause. I’m pretty damn sure it’s safe but just make sure you backup your things just in case though.

OK, bit lengthy but this works. You will need to download Resource Hacker which lets you open up EXE files and other types of Windows files and extract resources from them and also change some parts of the code in the files. ResHacker is available from here or in Simplified Chinese then you guys can get it here

Then, you need to download the Google patch which will then let you set Google as your default search engine in IE7. You can normally download this directly from Google.com (there is a box pointing up to the top right of your screen) or if you can’t find it, just download it from my server here instead. You then need to open up the file into Resource Hacker so that you can edit the properties.

If you stuff it up, don’t worry. Whenever you save it’ll always save an original and save the new version as a seperate file.

1) When you’ve opened the file in ResHacker, expand “String Table” and then expand “16” and then click on the little flower thing that’s labelled “0”.
2) You may need to open up Internet Explorer and find out the default address for your local Google. For the UK, it is www.google.co.uk and for example, Google for New Zealand is www.google.co.nz. (This page may help)
3) In the ResHacker window, under line “253” where the web address is, replace the domain name suffix with your local Google, so you should just replace the “com” part with “co.uk” or “co.nz” depending on where you are.
4) Click “Compile Script”, and then File and Save. Close Resource Hacker.
5) Double click on the file you have just made (make sure it does NOT have “original” in the filename) and run the file. Internet Explorer should open up with a success message.
6) Try searching for something using the Search bar in IE7 and see if it works.

Now, hopefully that should end up with you having a localised search in IE7. If it doesn’t work, just run or download again the Google patch and use that instead. Leave me some comments and let me know how it’s gone 🙂