Click the down arrow to the right of the search box, select "Find More Providers," and you'll be able to add a number of other search engines, including Google, Wikipedia, Ask.com, various news, shopping and weather searches, and more. Your best bet is to install multiple search engines; to switch among them, click the down arrow and choose which engine to use for that particular search.

Firefox still bests IE when it comes to this feature, because it offers far more search engines for the search box than does IE. That might change over time, because it's not that difficult to create a file that will add any search engine to Internet Explorer, via the OpenSearch specification. Expect there to be more search engines added to IE in the long run.

Security

To many of us, the most important aspects of IE7 are its new interface, tabbed browsing, and RSS support. But to Microsoft, it's all about security. In fact, when asked why IE7 was going to be delivered via Automatic Updates, a senior product manager cited security as the single most important reason.

The most obvious new security feature is the anti-phishing toolbar (more on that later). But Microsoft says that there are far more security features baked into the browser than users will ever see, and that these are as important, or even more important, than the anti-phishing tool.