It's very interesting how some different technologies come together. IE7 has a new search toolbar that's built on an open standard OpenSearch. Windows Live.com search has something called macros which allow someone to publish a specialized search. Others can then add that macro to their own search. It's possible to combine these two technologies to allow macro search from the toolbar. Here's how to use one using the OpenSearchList site.
I've created on Live.com a macro in the namespace Newtronic called Movies. This macro searches IMDB, Metacritic.com, RottenTomatoes.com, and RogerEbert.com. Before you can add it to your tool bar, you need to log into Live.com. Go to live search (to be honest, the only way I know to do this is search on anything and then you get the additional choices). To the right there's a pulldown that lets you find macros. Search for macro in namespace Newtronic and find the macro called movies. You'll be able to install it to your Live search.
Now go to Movies Searches on OpenSearchList. If you have IE7, you can click on Movies and it will add a custom search to your search tool bar.
That's it! Now you can put in a movie title into your IE7 search toolbar, select the toolbar pulldown and select Movies and it will search just those sites for movies. Very cool. (There appears to be a bug if you are already on the Live site, the search won't happen. If this happens to you, navigate away from Live.com and try again.)
If there are sites that you you search over and over again, here's away to get multiple sites into your toolbar. Live.com is working to make it easy to publish and use macros to search multiple sites along with other customization. OpenSearchList.com makes it easy to add those searches to your toolbar.
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