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The Universal Text Lookup Tool is a Windows utility that allows you to easily perform an Internet search on any selectable text on your computer.

Download now: usearch_10.zip - 12,480 bytes

Just run the program, and place a shortcut to it in your startup folder. The program runs in the background. You’ll know it is running when you see a magnifying glass on your taskbar.

To perform a search, first select text in a program such as your web browser or word processing program. Then press ALT-F1 and the product will search with the default search engine. Select text and press ALT-F2 and a menu of available search engines appears.

Press the Windows key + G and a dialog appears that lets you type in your own seach terms.

Use the preferences to add or modify your available search engines.

To add a new search engine, load the search engine in your browser and perform a search.

Copy the URL from the browser and replace the term you searched for with “%s”

About the program

The Universal Text Lookup Tool is written in C for Windows. It was written in C to keep it as small as possible. The program itself is only 26 kb and the hook dll adds another 6 kb.

Getting access to text in various programs is a challenge. In order to solve this challenge I decided a system wide keyboard hook would be best. When the program key combinations, ALT-F1 or ALT-F2, are detected, the hook will send a CTRL-C to the window which will (hopefully) copy the text that has been selected.

Other problems that needed to be solved included various codepage problems. These may or may not have been adequately addressed.

The source code is available for educational purposes but may not be used to create a version of the program for profit.

Download: usearch_10_src.zip 94.9 kb