IE 8 Searchbar – Instant Answers is really cool (see below).

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There’s only one problem: It doesn’t work in Austria (as in many other countries). I suppose it only works in the US :-)

To make it work, you need to change the regional settings to “English-US”.

There are two ways to do it

  • Change your regional settings :-) (that’s really bad…)
  • Change the settings of the search URL

The latter is the more interesting I suppose!

I had a look at the registry and found out that there is a setting for the search provider suggestion URL.

[Updated for BING] It’s under

HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Internet Explorer\
SearchScopes\{0116A124-45AC-4E95-81CF-08D9FD996515}

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There go to SuggestionsURLFallback and you will see that the URL ends with &FORM=IE8SSC&market={Language}. All you need to do is change {Language} to en-us.

Voila! Instant Answers will work for you, whatever your machine settings are.

You can download the registry .REG file here. (Just double click on it, to import the setting). [Update for BING]