When you select text in the Firefox web browser and right-click afterwards, you get a custom context menu with options to search Google for the selected term. That option can be quite handy to quickly find information about text on a website without having to type the text in a search form, or having to copy and paste it.
The question recently came up if it is possible to change the right-click context menu search engine from Google to another search engine. After some tweaking and testing, I found out that it is directly tied to the default search engine in Firefox.
Please note that there are two default search engines in the browser. First the search engine that is used when you enter text in the address bar of the browser, and then the search engine that is used when you use the search form to search on the Internet.
Firefox opens a Google search results page when you select search Google for from the Firefox right-click menu. The search engine context menu entry is linked directly to the search engine of the search form in Firefox.
When you change that default search engine, you change the search engine of the right-click menu as well.
The search form in my version of Firefox is hidden, and I’m sure that I’m not the only user who is only searching via Firefox’s address bar. You need to unhide the search form and switch the search engine in that form to change the right-click context menu search engine as well.
This is done by selecting View > Toolbars > Customize, and dragging and dropping the search engine to a toolbar of the browser.
There is no option to quickly change between search engines, especially not if you hide the search form by default. The Firefox add-on Context Search comes to the rescue. It can be used to select one of the installed search engines directly in the Firefox right-click menu.
The extension displays all installed search engines in the context menu, handy if you regularly switch between search engines in the browser.
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I have the Context Search add-on installed. It’s very nice and handy.
For instance if you come across a company name but there is no link to their webpage, highlighting and going directly to Google or your favorite search engine can get you the homepage w/o having to cut and paste the name in the FF search bar.
I agree, it is a lot easier.
Yes, in terms of searching from the context menu I use the following
- Context Search
- Add to Search Bar
- Organize Search Engines
I used to use ‘Conquery’ back in the day and tried a few others since but none of them seemed to function well outside of the basic search engines and had problems searching within board search engines.
I have been using that same extension trifecta, Mystique,
which I went into in detail last week in another post.
I agree that is the best search combination.
thanks for not posting the link to the addon, epic fail
I haven’t used the right click search in firefox since I installed clickto, instead of right-clicking on highlighted text you just “copy&paste” it to google, unfortunately it’s only google at the moment but I think I read something about bing, being the next search engine to join clickto, I think I read it here: http://www.clicktoapp.com/en/blog/
thx a lot i was looking for this complement
Hi,
Let me tell you how did I ended up here. I wanted to add DuckDuckGo to my context menu on Firefox so searched for “righclick firefox search engine” and your article was the first hit on duckduckgo search engine. Now I have that.
Thak you
BTW this help from DDG is great too.
http://help.duckduckgo.com/customer/portal/articles/216441