Change the Firefox Location Bar Search Engine

When you type in a word or phrase in the Firefox location bar you are either taken to Google’s search result page for the search term or, if the term has an authority website, to a website that is the authority for that search term. While most users might like the idea that Google is the default search engine and have nothing to object about that fact some would probably like to change the default search engine in Firefox to another one.

The major difficulty is to find the correct url of the new search engine to replace the Google url. But let me first explain where you can change the search url in Firefox. You need to type about:config in the address bar of Firefox and filter for the phrase keyword.URL. This parameter contains the search url that will be used when typing in a word or phrases in the location bar.

You can’t just add the url that you would enter to visit the search engine there, e.g. yahoo.com or wikipedia.com because the search - normally - uses special parameters. The best way to discover the correct url would be to perform a search at your search engine of choice and copy / paste that url after modifying it a bit. If you search at Yahoo you discover lots of irrelevant option parameters that do not need to be added.

The Yahoo url that could be added would be http://search.yahoo.com/search?p= for instance or http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ for Wikipedia. It’s all about a little trial and error but I think it’s well worth the effort.