I'm confused. I don't use IE9 ('cos I prefer Firefox 14) but a quick bit of Googling shows that (in common with most other modern browsers) it's got a dedicated search box to the right of the address bar. It's that box that you should use (rather than the address bar) for the most efficient web searching.
As IE9 is a Microsoft product, the default search engine is Bing (which is owned by Microsoft) but you can change that by simply clicking on the little downward-pointing arrowhead, next to the search box.
Chris