Microsoft’s new browser IE 8 has just been released in Beta and it comes with a search box in the upper right-hand corner and, just below that, a row of tiny logos for various search destinations, such as Yahoo, Ebay and MySpace. You can select which destinations you want to include here.

If your search will likely end up in Wikipedia, for instance, with a single click over a little “W” you can search only that encyclopedia. Amazon.com (nasdaq: AMZN – news – people ) displays items for sale. The New York Times shows snippets of stories. So far 27 Web sites have joined the drop-down column, including Facebook and Digg.

Microsoft is, uncharacteristically, keeping its hands off, giving Web sites the option to serve up results and customize how they appear. It also magnanimously lets those sites take all the revenue from ads alongside the results. That’s a sly stab at Google’s business, though this kind of searching–where users already know where they want to go–doesn’t yield especially lucrative ads for Google.

Another Google-dodging feature in the new browser: Highlighting a street address on a Web page launches a map, with the default set to Microsoft’s Live Maps (though you can change this default to Google Maps).

Read more here: Microsoft’s Sneak Attack On Google – Forbes.com