After using progressive browsers such as Firefox and Safari in my previous employers, imagine my dismay when I realised we were stuck with IE6. 
One of the things I missed as I had to step back and bear with old IE6 is the absence of the search bar. We're not allowed to upgrade to IE7 nor download browsers (lest we risk dismissal, shudder!) so there was nothing I could do...or was it? Anyway many thanks to my officemate who gave me this cool registry hack. Maybe you've seen this already, maybe not. But then if you're also stuck with IE6...
So let's pretend you want to be able to do a Google search quickly. You can configure IE so that by typing in "g devpinoy" in the address bar it will go and search for "devpinoy" in Google. How do you do that? Copy this and paste it into a .reg (registry) file:
Windows Registry Editor Version 5.00
[HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Internet Explorer\SearchURL\g]
@="http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF8&q=%s"
" "="+"
"%"="%25"
"&"="%26"
"+"="%2B"
"#"="%23"
"?"="%3F"
Basically the technique here is that you define the shortcut ("g" in this case) and the URL to which the search query string (the "%s") is appended to. One can also apply the same to search in Wikipedia (mapped to the letter "w"):
Windows Registry Editor Version 5.00
[HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Internet Explorer\SearchURL\w]
@="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Search?search=%s"
" "="+"
"%"="%25"
"&"="%26"
"+"="%2B"
"#"="%23"
"?"="%3F"
Or to a quick Google search for stuff in Microsoft's MSDN site (mapped to the letter "m"):
Windows Registry Editor Version 5.00
[HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Internet Explorer\SearchURL\m]
@="http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF8&q=%s+site:msdn.microsoft.com"
" "="+"
"%"="%25"
"&"="%26"
"+"="%2B"
"#"="%23"
"?"="%3F"
Sorry Microsoft, but the fact is it's much faster to use Google to search MSDN than that puny "search" bar within MSDN itself. 
In fact I liked this technique so much that I miss it whenever I go home and surf using more modern browsers. So I was really happy when this feature came already built into the Google Chrome browser. Exciting times are ahead of all of us!