How to Change the Default Search Engine in Firefox?

How to Change the 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.

Change the 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.

Change the 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.

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 (type about:config in the address bar and hit enter )
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.

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="