If you are a Firefox user, you will undoubtedly know that Google has paid Mozilla for precedence in both the Search Box, and the Location Bar Search. Google is the default search engine used if you just type a bunch of keywords in the Location Bar instead of a URL. Firefox takes those keywords, sends them to Google, and if the top result has a high enough page rank, it sends you to the page itself (much like I’m feeling lucky).
Since I’ve switched to Yahoo as my main search engine, mainly due to Google’s recent privacy scandals and coupled with the research which tends towards Yahoo results as being more reliable (Google bombing anyone?), I’ve been trying to look for a way of switching the default search engine to Yahoo. After a bit of searching, I found the answer:
1) Type about:config in a new tab.
2) Filter the configuration variables by “keyword.URL“, there should be one result by the same name.
3) Change the value of keyword.URL from the Google URL (should be: http://www.google.com/search?ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8&sourceid=navclient&gfns=1&q=) to: http://search.yahoo.com/search?ei=UTF-8&p=
Bingo, typing keywords into the location bar will now make Firefox search using Yahoo.
Note: You can add other “attributes” to the search URL, as long as &p= is left at the end, since this is where Firefox adds the search keywords.
Popularity: 3% [?]
February 8th, 2008 at 8:54 PM
I dislike Google as much as the next guy and I’m also worried about all that informatio Google is collecting, but I think that knowing that MS’s search sucks bigtime I have no option but to use Google.
I’ll try Yahoo and I’ll tell you later
XD