Change Address Bar Search Behavior In Firefox

This is a follow up of the article that explained how to edit the prefix and suffix auto-completion settings in Firefox. One related setting is the way the Firefox search bar behavior works. When a text is entered into the address bar and send to Firefox a Google Browse By Name search is conducted. This means that Google tries to associate a website with the name, entering CNN or NEWS would load the CNN website.

Some users would probably prefer a different search behavior. The default search behavior can be changed by editing the search engine in the Firefox options. It is for instance possible to change the search to a normal Google or Yahoo search which would have the effect that the search result list would always be displayed after sending text to the browser that is not in url form.

The search engine can be changed in the Firefox configuration which can be loaded by typing about:config in the address bar. Entering keyword.URL in the filter field will display the responsible parameter.

The value of the parameter contains the Google search string that is responsible for the Browse By Name search. Removing the gfns=1 variable from the query (and one of the & chars) would turn that query into a normal Google search that would display the search results all the time.

http://www.google.com/search?ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8&sourceid=navclient&q=

Changing the search provider from Google to another one is possible as well. The Yahoo url would look like this:

http://search.yahoo.com/search?p=%s

It is important to change the search word with the %s replacement to make the search work on other search engines.