Your own search engine

I'm been playing around with one of the quite cool features of Live.com search: the ability to create your own customised searches that you can then use instead of the "vanilla" search you get out of the box.

What does that mean? Well, if I'm sometimes only interested in finding sites with a ".co.uk" ending for example, or sites that are in English only, or sites in a specific country or region, etc - then I can set up a new live.com search page that always produces just that subset of search terms. And I can list that as a search provider on IE7 so it appears at the top right, always available.

Hmmm so potentially interesting, how do you do that? Here's a walkthrough of how to search for just ".co.uk" addresses that are in English:

1) Go to http://beta.search.live.com/macros/

2) Click "create a new macro"

3) Choose the "advanced" option, then click "next"

4) In the box in the middle of the screen enter "inurl:.co.uk AND language:EN" (without the quote signs). And check out all the other options while you're there - there is quite a bit of power to create sophisitcated searches such as only those that find pdf files.

5) Click "save macro"

6) Choose a name for it eg English_UK, and click "finish"

Your new search page will appear. To add it to the IE7 search providers at the top right hand corner, click "add to browser search box".

From now on you can select your "English_UK" search provider and your search will only return English language websites with a ".co.uk" in the URL.

Your can share your creations with the world, or see macros that other people have created on http://gallery.live.com/default.aspx?l=4. For example, this one just searches for MSDN content, and this one searches a long list of reference sites.

Pretty smart.