October 30, 2008

How to hide the Internet Explorer 7 search box

A little registry magic does the trick.

I use the Google toolbar in both IE and Firefox, primarily because I love the ability to share bookmarks across browsers and across machines. But I've always been bugged by the waste of toolbar space of having two Google search boxes--one supplied by IE and one supplied by the Google toolbar.

So, I went looking for the option to turn off the search box. This was pretty obvious in FF but not so in IE. (Did I miss it?) Here's a bit of registry magic that did the trick.

To hide the IE 7 search box:

Close all instances of IE 7.
Open a command prompt window (i.e., a DOS box).
Type the following command (all on one line) and press ENTER:

REG ADD "HKCU\Software\Policies\Microsoft\Internet Explorer\InfoDelivery\Restrictions" /V NoSearchBox /T REG_DWORD /F /D 1

Topic Tags: Internet Explorer, registry, search

by F. Andy Seidl

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How to hide the Internet Explorer 7 search box