Firefox Address Bar – How to Change Default Search Engine

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I love the ability to just type something into Firefox's address bar and do a Google search. But I was wondering if there was some way to customize what search engine Firefox used?

Best Answer

In FireFox, in your address bar type

about:config

and press Enter. Now look for an entry that's titled "keyword.URL", this is the config key that contains which search URL to use when you search through your address bar. If you double click the entry, you can change the value.

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By default it should be set to google, which uses this query URL: http://www.google.com/search?&q= It's possible it's a bit different but it should be similar.

Some examples for search engines' query URLs:

Google: http://www.google.com/search?&q=
Yahoo: http://search.yahoo.com/search?p=
Ask: http://www.ask.com/web?q=
Bing: http://www.bing.com/search?q=1

If you want an other search engine, and don't know the query URL, do the following:

  1. Go to your preferred search engine (E.g. Google)

  2. Perform a search with an easily recognisable keyword like "HELLOWORLD"

  3. In your address bar, there should be an URL containing your keyword. For Google it would be something like http://www.google.nl/search?q=HELLOWORLD&ie=utf-8&oe=utf-8&aq=t&rls=org.mozilla:nl:official&client=firefox-a

  4. Now just delete everything after the "=" that's just before your chosen keyword. Your query URL for Google would be: http://www.google.nl/search?q=

    enter image description here

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