Here’s something fun:

I was reading this guide on Windows Desktop Search (WDS) and how to make it search your intranet. Once the relevant policies are applied and WDS gets restarted, an ‘intranet’ search button appears. The idea is that you can point it to a SharePoint Portal Server that has an index of all of your enterprise’s artifacts. Finally, there is another button called ‘Web’ which of course submits your query to MSN Search.

I manually added the following key to my registry: HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Policies\Microsoft\DesktopSearch. Under there, I added ‘PrimaryIntranetSearchScopeUrl’ with a value of ‘http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=$w’. This way I have made Google my ‘intranet’. I can now submit queries to my local machine, MSN Search, and Google from one interface 🙂