The default address bar search engine in the Firefox web browser is Google Search. This means that any search phrase that the user enters directly into the Firefox address bar gets send to Google Search which returns either a direct hit or a search results page.
Some Internet users might prefer to have a different search engine as the default in Firefox. This can be done easily in the configuration of Firefox.
To do that type about:config in the Firefox address bar. First time users need to verify that they are carefully from this point on, everyone else will see the configuration parameters right away.
Enter keyword.url in the filter field, this should return one result:
firefox default search
The value of the parameter should display a Google Search url as the default value. This can easily be changed to another search provider by double-clicking the line and entering a new url that points to a search provider in the form that opens up.
address bar search
Here is a selection of alternative search engines that can be added as the default search engine:
- Bing: http://www.bing.com/search?q=
- Yahoo: http://search.yahoo.com/search?ei=ISO-8859-1&p=
- Twitter: http://search.twitter.com/search?q=
Other search engines can be added as easily. All it usually takes is to perform a search on the search engine of your choice and copy the url without the search phrase into the value field in Firefox.
On a side note: I decided to switch to Bing. Why? Well it mainly has something to do with the current update of Google’s search engine ranking algorithm which does not rank my sites on top if I perform a title search but scraper sites (sites that copy contents from my site). Something has gone terribly wrong here.
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Thank You, somehow when I installed ilivid it changed it and I didn’t know how to change it back..
Thanks
Ouch, I just copied and pasted part of this article into Google and found the content stealers. Here’s an article that you may want to read about stopping such people:
http://lorelle.wordpress.com/2006/04/10/what-do-you-do-when-someone-steals-your-content/
Locutus, that article looks to be really helpful, thanks a lot.
you can change it with https
http://androidyou.blogspot.com/2010/08/replace-google-search-provider-url-with.html
what is the default google one because winamp changed it to their custom search and i need to change it back…
please help
Uh this did not work I typed in http://www.bing.com/search?q= like you suggested and it does not do anything but say this!!!
Firefox doesn’t know how to open this address, because the protocol (bing) isn’t associated with any program.
So? anymore suggestions moron?
Thank you. Was very simple. Worked perfectly.
This was incredibly helpful, thank you! For those that are wondering, the Google one is: http://www.google.com/search?=
If you have another favorite, Dogpile, for instance, it’s simple to find its search URL. Just type a query into the original search bar — the search URL is typically anything before that query. To check, replace the query with another by directly typing it into the address bar. If that gets you a pageful of results on your new query, you can be reasonably sure that that’s the URL to tell Firefox!
Martin,
you are my best friend!!!!
Some shity plugin once changed this to a shity search engine and I couldn’t get it fix up until now. Thanks a lot!
Johnny