Search in corporate environments

Article Nov 5, 2011

Internet Explorer 9’s new One Box allows users to type search terms in the address bar, where any text in the address bar that does not appear to be a URL is sent to the currently selected search provider. Internet Explorer 9 starts with the default search provider, but if a user switches to a secondary provider, the search is performed with the selected provider.

For domain-joined machines, a single word is treated as a search term instead of as an intranet site. This allows Internet Explorer 9 users in the corporate environment to experience immediate search. In Internet Explorer 8, a single word was treated as an intranet site, and upon failure, the browser would resolve to the default search provider. This could take time and the result wasn’t always predictable.

To explicitly go to an intranet site (such as http://contoso/) in Internet Explorer 9, both the trailing slash character (“contoso/”) and http:// prefix will trigger navigation. Internet Explorer 9 also checks in the background to see if an intranet site is available in the single-word scenario and offers matches through the Notification bar. If you select the intranet site from the Notification bar, Internet Explorer 9 remembers that the word is associated with an intranet site, and the next time you type in the intranet site name, Internet Explorer 9 uses inline auto-complete to resolve to the intranet site address.

For corporations who would like to have one-word searches default to search for an intranet site, administrators can enable the Go to an intranet site for a single word entry in the Address bar group policy. When this group policy is enabled, a search for “contoso” triggers an intranet search for http://contoso.