Two of the big new features in IE8 are its Accelerators and visual search facilities. Microsoft, unsurprisingly, claims that both will make a big difference to your browsing habits. But what does it all mean?

Accelerators are the headline act. Think of them as contextual searching: the ability to do a search related to any piece of text on a page. But IE8 doesn’t simply perform the equivalent of copy-and-pasting your highlighted text into Google: you can do plenty more.

Using Accelerators is simplicity itself: highlight any piece of text and a small blue icon shimmers into view nearby.

Click it and you’re presented with a list of Accelerators. So highlight a postcode, for instance, hover over Map with Live Search, and a second or so later you’ll be presented with a map of the local area in situ.

Alternatively, you can click on Map with Live Search to open your map in a new tab. This neat feature doesn’t work with all Accelerators, unfortunately. A few, such as Define with Google, force you to open a new tab, which can be frustrating when you simply wanted a brief answer.

It comes as no surprise that the default Accelerators are heavy with Windows Live and Live Search options, but there’s already a fair range of options from other providers. By default, Email This directs you to Windows Live Mail, but can be supplanted by Gmail or AOL, or you could add both. You can add the option to share either a chunk of text or an entire page on Facebook, StumbleUpon, Twitter or Windows Live Messenger. The full list of Accelerators can be found on Microsoft’s official site. All your installed search engines also appear in the Accelerator menu.

It’s possible to optimise your list of Accelerators to make getting information even faster. To do this, go to Tools > Manage Add-ons, then click Accelerators. By default, when you click the Accelerator icon on a web page, you’re given every Accelerator that has Default status in the Manage Add-ons window. So if you find yourself frequently digging into the nested menu for All Accelerators, you can make it a Default Accelerator, and it will appear on the main menu. You can only have one Default Accelerator in each category, but it’s possible to create a different category. So if you’d like Gmail and Windows Live Mail to appear on the first Accelerator menu, you could move Gmail to a new category and set it as the default in that one.

Finally, the default blank page in IE8 (about:Tabs) has a section called Use an Accelerator. This shows all of your Accelerators with Default status, and when you click one it takes you to the home page of that Accelerator. So click Share on Facebook and you’ll be taken to your Facebook profile. Alternatively you can click Show copied text, and any text on the clipboard will appear, ready to be Accelerated.

A fresh lick of paint has been applied to the search bar too. As with IE7, you can add almost any search provider you like, but certain search engines – notably Wikipedia, Amazon and eBay – produce as-you-go previews of your search terms, called visual search suggestions. So search Wikipedia for Boeing, for instance, and you’ll see a series of search results, complete with thumbnail images.

It’s a useful included feature for eBay as well, letting you see the first few hits of any search term: a godsend for those whose search behaviour rarely involves looking beyond the first few results. The only drawback is that visual search suggestions require the complicity of IE8 and the search engine in question. So add Google to your instant search box, for instance, and you don’t get anything more interesting than a list of your most recent searches.