In Firefox when you type in a word in the address bar and just click enter, if the DNS name or URL is not found you are taken to a search engine page or a 404 page depending on how Firefox is configured. Mostly it defaults to Google and will query based on the words you entered in the address bar, but if you installed other toolbars this “default search” can be replaced by other search engines including Yahoo, Scour, MSN among others. In researching how to remove scour from my default search URL I found the following steps which may help users change their default search engine for Firefox:
The first thing you want to do is decide what do you want to happen when you type something in the address bar and then hit enter, do you want it to search for what you typed, or display an error page if you typed something incorrectly. I prefer a search term, as often I just type “dictionary” or some other keyword and would prefer to see listings.
Once you know what you want to set it to, then open up your Firefox and type about:config in the URL bar
Then type keyword.URL in the filter tab to see what is set for your default.
You can see from the image I set mine back to Google, note that you cannot simply type in a homepage, as this will just append the keyword to whatever URL is typed, you must type the proper URL that will initiate the query.
Here are some examples for users to set their keyword.URL to:
| Google Search: | http://www.google.com/search?q= |
| Yahoo Search: | http://search.yahoo.com/search?p= |
| Microsoft Bing: | http://www.bing.com/search?q= |
| DogPile Search: | http://www.dogpile.com/info.dogpl/search/web/ |
| Altavista Search: | http://www.altavista.com/web/results?itag=ody&q= |
| Ask.com Search: | http://www.ask.com/web?qsrc=1&o=0&l=dir&q= |
If you have questions about how to set other search engines as the default Firefox Search engine just leave me a comment and I will find out and update the table above here.
For those who don’t want to set any search at all, and would prefer to automatically have .com appended to any keyword they enter, so if you just typed “dictionary” and hit enter, it would append .com and you would be taken to dictionary.com, you can change the keyword.enabled to false
-Dragon Blogger
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Tags: change firefox search, firefox about config, firefox about:config, firefox bing default, firefox default search, firefox dogpile default, firefox keyword.url, firefox use bing, firefox use dogpile, firefox yahoo default
November 16th, 2009 at 12:08 am
Thanks for this firefox tip. I have had firefox for a long time, but I was not aware you could change your search options. My deafult search engine always defaulted to some orbit downloader webpage when there is a page not found error. Thanks again, this helps.
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