Integrate Google’s Deskbar and Desktop

Here is a cool trick. Have you installed both the Google Deskbar and Google Desktop Search? Would you like to integrate them so you can search both from the Deskbar?

At the moment, Google Desktop Search isn’t designed to work with the Google Deskbar. As an alternative, the Deskbar offers a Custom Search feature which you may be able to use to create a specialized Desktop Search.

This is an advanced feature of the Google Deskbar. It can be very convenient, but is recommended you use this feature only if you’re already comfortable with the Deskbar and able to figure out complicated URLs.

That said, if you’d like to give it a try here’s how to do it:

1. Open Microsoft Internet Explorer, go to the Desktop Search homepage, and do a search on any search term. The URL of the results page should look something like

http://xxx.x.x.x:xxxx/search&s=xxxxxxxxxx?q=foo

where the x’s are numbers and ‘foo’ is the query you searched. If your URL is longer than this, you can ignore the part of it after your search term.

Write down or copy the URL of your results page so you can edit it. Replace your search term with {1}, so the result looks like

http://xxx.x.x.x:xxxx/search&s=xxxxxxxxxx?q={1}

2. On the Deskbar, click the small arrow to the right of the Google search button. Go to ‘Options’ > ‘Customized Searches’ > ‘Add.’

3. In the dialog box that appears, enter a name (for example, Google Desktop Search) in the ‘Name for deskbar menu’ box. In the ‘URL’ box, enter the URL that you ended up with in step 1. You can also enter an optional shortcut for this customized search. To do this, enter a letter in the box next to ‘Ctrl + .’

5. Click ‘OK’ to close the ‘Custom Search Description’ dialog box. Click ‘OK’ again to close the ‘Google Deskbar Settings’ dialog box.

Once you’ve done this, you can use your Custom Search to search Desktop Search from the Google Deskbar. Coooool.