You cannot use a colon (:), a dot (.) or a slash (/) in an autosearch argument. These characters are used to distinguish an autosearch argument from a normal URL.
You can disable the autosearch feature if you don't like it.
Some example URLs for common search engines:
AltaVista | http://altavista.digital.com/cgi-bin/query?pg=q&what=web&fmt=&q=%s
|
Yahoo! | http://search.yahoo.com/bin/search?p=%s
|
Lycos | http://lycos11.lycos.cs.cmu.edu/cgi-bin/pursuit&query=%s&minterms=1&minscore=0.01&terse=on
|
Excite | http://www.excite.com/search.gw&search=%s
|
Magellan | http://www.mckinley.com/mckinley-cgi/iopcode.pl&query=%s
|
You can easily find the URL for your favourite search engine if it isn't
listed above. Just do a search with the engine, then copy the URL of the
resulting page. Locate the search string you entered, it should appear
somewhere in the URL. Replace this search string by "%s
"
(without quotes).