Klemid's SearchBar

IE toolbar for searching multiple sites with the same search value.
Download goes here.

Functionality  Prerequisites  Installation  Usage  Open  issues  Buy  Change log

This Internet Explorer (IE) toolbar makes searching on the Internet more convenient. How often do you enter the same search value because you want to search multiple sites for the same item? Imagine you are on an Internet shopping tour and you want to search eBay, Amazon, and some comparison sites. With Klemid's SearchBar you need to enter the search value only once. You can reuse it for searching other sites over and over again. Even better, when you start searching e.g. at eBay, SearchBar remembers the search value and you can reuse it for other searches. SearchBar is small, i.e. it doesn't eat up a complete line within IE.
SearchBar leverages my own Sample Toolbar and adds more features to it. If comes as very cheap Shareware. You may use it w/o registering it but with the restrictions that the number of sites you can search is limited.

SearchBar runs on Internet Explorer 5.5 and 6.0 in Windows 2000, Windows XP and Windows 2003. Regular testing is done only on Windows XP and IE 6.0. If you run a different configuration, please check before you buy SearchBar.
To keep the download size small, the Installer file does not contain some components which are present on a typical PC but not on all PCs. Those are:

• VB6 runtime
• Microsoft XML Parser Version3
• Microsoft Windows Script 5.5 or later

SearchBar comes as a Microsoft Installer 2.0 installation file. This provides a full-blown installation and de-installation. After an successful installation the SearchBar will automatically appear in the next Internet Explorer session you open.

Enter you search value into the combobox text field or, later, choose one from the list. The choose the site from the drop-down menu item. SearchBar remembers you last choice. Next time you can trigger the search by entering the search value and pressing enter.
You can rearrange the sites listed using the menu item "Edit Sites". You can also load another site list using the "Open Site File" button. Users familiar to XML may use the "Edit XML" option to edit all sites at once.
Again, experienced users may add their own sites to the list. Use "Add Current Site" to do this. This opens a wizard, which guides you thru the couple of steps. Finally this result in a new entry in the site list.
The feature you will love most is that search values are grabbed from sites known to SearchBar and entered into the search value field. This works by means of regular expressions. Each site configuration carries such an regular expression in order to extract the search value from the URLs fired. SearchBar hooks into all navigations performed by IE and checks whether ths URL matches with a site in the list and the extracts the search value. When you add your own site, the system makes a guess to calculate the best regular expression for this, but this may fail in complex cases. Experienced users may change the regular expression accordingly.

Assuming you like SearchBar pretty much and you want to do me a favour :-) or you want to get rid of the restriction on the number of items, you may send me an Email. I'll let you know how you can buy a SearchBar license for 6 USD or 5 EUR.

No known issues currently

03 Apr

2005

Initially submitted to www.klemid.de.