How To Change The Firefox Address Bar Search Provider
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 may result in a search on Google instead of a website that is opened directly in Firefox.
To be precise: any text that the user types in the location bar that cannot be mapped to a domain name is searched on Google Search.
Update: Please note that Mozilla changed the feature described below in Firefox 23. All versions from this point onwards don't support the keyword.url parameter anymore. You can restore it however with the help of a browser extension as described in this article.
Some Internet users may prefer to have a different search engine as the default in Firefox, for instance if their favorite search engine is Bing or another search engine that is not Google. This can be done easily in the advanced 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:
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.
Note that this is completely independent of the browser's search bar that may be displayed to the right of the location bar in the interface.
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.
Here is a selection of alternative search engines that can be added as the default search engine:
- Bing: http://www.bing.com/search?q=
- Google Browse By Name: http://www.google.com/search?ie=UTF-8&sourceid=navclient&gfns=1&q=
- Google I'm Feeling Lucky: http://www.google.com/search?ie=UTF-8&btnI=&q=
- Yahoo: http://search.yahoo.com/search?ei=ISO-8859-1&p=
- DuckDuckGO: https://duckduckgo.com/?q=
- IxQuick: http://ixquick.com/do/metasearch.pl?cat=web&query=
- 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.
Update: You can also check out the Mycroft Project which offers a big list of different search providers. The list includes popular providers like Facebook, YouTube, Google, Bing or Wikipedia plus a lot of lesser known search providers that may be more specialize than the ones mentioned.
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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Doesn’t Windows 8 know that www. or http:// are passe ?
Well it is a bit difficulty to distinguish between name.com domains and files for instance.
I know a service made by google that is similar to Google bookmarks.
http://www.google.com/saved
@Ashwin–Thankful you delighted my comment; who knows how many “gamers” would have disagreed!
@Martin
The comments section under this very article (3 comments) is identical to the comments section found under the following article:
https://www.ghacks.net/2023/08/15/netflix-is-testing-game-streaming-on-tvs-and-computers/
Not sure what the issue is, but have seen this issue under some other articles recently but did not report it back then.
Omg a badge!!!
Some tangible reward lmao.
It sucks that redditors are going to love the fuck out of it too.
With the cloud, there is no such thing as unlimited storage or privacy. Stop relying on these tech scums. Purchase your own hardware and develop your own solutions.
This is a certified reddit cringe moment. Hilarious how the article’s author tries to dress it up like it’s anything more than a png for doing the reddit corporation’s moderation work for free (or for bribes from companies and political groups)
Almost al unlmited services have a real limit.
And this comment is written on the dropbox article from August 25, 2023.
First comment > @ilev said on August 4, 2012 at 7:53 pm
For the God’s sake, fix the comments soon please! :[
Yes. Please. Fix the comments.
With Google Chrome, it’s only been 1,500 for some time now.
Anyone who wants to force me in such a way into buying something that I can get elsewhere for free will certainly never see a single dime from my side. I don’t even know how stupid their marketing department is to impose these limits on users instead of offering a valuable product to the paying faction. But they don’t. Even if you pay, you get something that is also available for free elsewhere.
The algorithm has also become less and less savvy in terms of e.g. English/German translations. It used to be that the bot could sort of sense what you were trying to say and put it into different colloquialisms, which was even fun because it was like, “I know what you’re trying to say here, how about…” Now it’s in parts too stupid to translate the simplest sentences correctly, and the suggestions it makes are at times as moronic as those made by Google Translations.
If this is a deep-learning AI that learns from users’ translations and the phrases they choose most often – which, by the way, is a valuable, moneys worthwhile contribution of every free user to this project: They invest their time and texts, thereby providing the necessary data for the AI to do the thing as nicely as they brag about it in the first place – alas, the more unprofessional users discovered the translator, the worse the language of this deep-learning bot has become, the greater the aggregate of linguistically illiterate users has become, and the worse the language of this deep-learning bot has become, as it now learns the drivel of every Tom, Dick and Harry out there, which is why I now get their Mickey Mouse language as suggestions: the inane language of people who can barely spell the alphabet, it seems.
And as a thank you for our time and effort in helping them and their AI learn, they’ve lowered the limit from what was once 5,000 to now 1,500…? A big “fuck off” from here for that! Not a brass farthing from me for this attitude and behaviour, not in a hundred years.
When will you put an end to the mess in the comments?
Ghacks comments have been broken for too long. What article did you see this comment on? Reply below. If we get to 20 different articles we should all stop using the site in protest.
I posted this on [https://www.ghacks.net/2023/09/28/reddit-enforces-user-activity-tracking-on-site-to-push-advertising-revenue/] so please reply if you see it on a different article.
Comment redirected me to [https://www.ghacks.net/2012/08/04/add-search-the-internet-to-the-windows-start-menu/] which seems to be the ‘real’ article it is attached to
Comment redirected me to [https://www.ghacks.net/2012/08/04/add-search-the-internet-to-the-windows-start-menu/] which seems to be the ‘real’ article it is attached to
Article Title: Reddit enforces user activity tracking on site to push advertising revenue
Article URL: https://www.ghacks.net/2023/09/28/reddit-enforces-user-activity-tracking-on-site-to-push-advertising-revenue/
No surprises here. This is just the beginning really. I cannot see a valid reason as to why anyone would continue to use the platform anymore when there are enough alternatives fill that void.
I’m not sure if there is a point in commenting given that comments seem to appear under random posts now, but I’ll try… this comment is for https://www.ghacks.net/2023/09/28/reddit-enforces-user-activity-tracking-on-site-to-push-advertising-revenue/
My temporary “solution”, if you can call it that, is to use a VPN (Mullvad in my case) to sign up for and access Reddit via a European connection. I’m doing that with pretty much everything now, at least until the rest of the world catches up with GDPR. I don’t think GDPR is a magical privacy solution but it’s at least a first step.