How do I add a "private" opensearch plugin to IE9?

Question

It seems the only way to add any search plugin is via the ms website. I have a working opensearch plugin for an intranet site, including autodiscovery, which works fine in Firefox and IE8. Some sites suggest that opensearch autodiscovery doesn't work anymore in IE9.

So, how do I add a search plugin to IE9 that is not listed on the MS site? One of the plugins I can't add anymore includes the stackexchange one, so this is actually a serious problem ;-)

Answer 1

It seems the only way to accomplish this is fiddling with the registry. This .reg-file worked for my own search plugin:

Windows Registry Editor Version 5.00

[HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Internet Explorer\SearchScopes\{5AB8F1FE-2CAD-45FD-8B50-9E5610E4D2B6}]
"DisplayName"="Mysite search"
"URL"="http://mysite/index.jsp?q={searchTerms}&s=1"
"ShowSearchSuggestions"=dword:00000001
"SuggestionsURL"="http://mysite/searchsuggestions.jsp?b=i&q={searchTerms}"
"FaviconPath"="C:\\somePath\\search_{5AB8F1FE-2CAD-45FD-8B50-9E5610E4D2B6}.ico"

It seems the Icon needs to be stored in a local path. I was not able to get the FaviconURL to work. It doesn't need to have the guid in the filename, any name will work.

Once you have your plugin registered, you can set it as default via IE. If you want to do it programatically, you need to add the following to your .reg-file:

[HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Internet Explorer\SearchScopes]
"DefaultScope"="{5AB8F1FE-2CAD-45FD-8B50-9E5610E4D2B6}"