How To Change Default Search Engine In Firefox?

In Firefox, you can perform searches from both the address bar as well as the search box. The default search engines are different for the address bar and the search bar. Changing one of them does not change the other. In this article we shall see how to change the default search engine in both the cases.

How to change Default Search Engine of Search Box in Firefox?

Changing the search engine for the search box is pretty easy. Just click on the drop down arrow beside the search engine icon and select a search engine of your choice. Firefox will remember this and will give search results using this search engine from now onwards whenever you type in the search bar.

You can also assign keywords to a search engine. For example assigning ‘Yah’ to Yahoo.com will let you search for dkszone on Yahoo from the address bar by typing “Yah dkszone. For example, if the default search engine of address bar is Google, this feature will let you override it by placing the keyword for Yahoo before the search term. The steps to assign a keyword are:

• Click on the drop down icon of the Search box.
• Select Manage Search Engines. This will bring up the Manage Search Engines List window
• Click on the search engine for which you want to assign a keyword and click Edit Keyword button.
• Enter a keyword of your choice.

How to change Default Search Engine of Address Bar in Firefox?

Whenever you type a keyword in Firefox’s Address bar (also known as location bar), it’s default search engine is used to show results for that keyword. If you want to change this default search engine of location bar, then you will have to edit about:config of Firefox. If you are not aware of about:config, then read this article on how to open and edit about:config in Firefox.

Assuming that you want to change your default search engine to Bing here are the steps to do it:
Make sure you do this carefully.

1. Open about:config in Firefox
2. Search for keyword.url from the filter box.
3. Double click on this entry. It will open a dialog where you can edit the ‘keyword.url’ string.
4. Change this string to http://www.bing.com/search?ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8&sourceid=navclient&gfns=1&q=

In case you want to change the default search engine to some other search engine like Google, Yahoo, Ask, Conduit, Altavista etc. then simply replace searchengine with the name of the search engine in the string:

“http://www.searchengine.com/search?ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8&sourceid=navclient&gfns=1&q=“

For example in case of Google, the url will be:
“http://www.google.com/search?ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8&sourceid=navclient&gfns=1&q=“