As you know, Firefox address bar can not only be used for opening websites but also for searching as well. Yes, you can configure the Firefox address bar with various search engines like
- Yahoo
- Microsoft’s Live
- Wikipedia etc
By default, whenever you type anything in address bar and hit enter or press the GO button, Firefox checks whether the entered string is valid address or not. If it’s a valid address Firefox tries to load corresponding site for you. Now, if the entered string is an invalid URL, it will be submitted to Google Search and search results are returned.
Do you want to change the Default search engine ?
Google is everybody’s first choice search. Or, if you have Google Toolbar installed then you may want to configure the address bar with some other Search Engine.
The following steps will guide you how to configure your Firefox address bar with Search Engines of your choice.
1- Open Mozilla Firefox and type in the address bar about:config.
2- Next type keyword.URL in the Filter box which is appeared after the first step is completed successfully. As you type the above text, the long list will be trimmed down to one line. (You will see only 1 entry (keyword.URL) under the Preference Name section)
3- Now right click that single entry and select modify. A box will appear. Refer the image given below.
4- Choose your Search Engine type and accordingly enter the string value of various Search Engines given below.
List of Various Search Engines is as follows :
(Copy any of the below strings and paste it into the box that appear in STEP 3 above)
Default Google Search
|
|
Google Search with I’m Feeling Lucky
http://www.google.co.in/search?btnI=I%27m+Feeling+Lucky&q= |
Yahoo search
http://search.yahoo.com/search?p= |
Microsoft’s Live Search
http://search.live.com/results.aspx?q= |
Wikipedia
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Search?fulltext=Search&search= |
Technorati
http://www.technorati.com/search/ |
Hope, this may be helpful for many of you.
Very helpful. Thanks,
By: Manoj Gupta on January 23, 2009
at 4:57 pm
Great document, thanks…
By: Engin on March 3, 2009
at 12:35 am
This was exactly what I was looking for. Thanks!
By: bob on March 18, 2009
at 3:12 pm
Thanks! Love it!
By: misty1334 on April 16, 2009
at 5:32 am
Thanks! When I downloaded AIM it changed my search engine to AOL search,very sneaky.
Thanks for your help
By: eddie on April 29, 2009
at 12:23 am
Same reply as eddie here. When I upgraded to AIM 6.9 they automatically (without asking) downloaded and installed the AIM toolbar for my Firefox and IE. It changed my Firefox address-bar-search to AOL search…which was extremely annoying, as I was not asked to install the stupid toolbar in the first place (they didn’t provide an option to NOT install the toolbar). I searched up “firefox address bar search” to get to this page. Thank God for the tags you put on this post. lol. Very much appreciated.
By: Brian on August 17, 2009
at 5:58 am
Nope, didn’t work. My ISP (Cablevision’s Optimum Online) tries to resolve whatever I type as a website URL, barfs up it’s own ‘domain not found’ page with it’s own search results instead of Google’s.
By: Frank on August 22, 2009
at 12:11 am
Thank god i was getting annoyed at how hard it was to get rid of “my web search” even after removing it
Very helpful thanx
By: confusionfusion on August 23, 2009
at 7:27 am