Change Default Search Engine on Firefox

I think most of us already know that when you type in anything on the address bar on Firefox address bar, it will automatically search the word using Google search engine.

Some of you probably hates Google so much (because they banned you for fraud clicking on Google Adsense) that you rather use other search engine. Maybe you a movie fanatic, and you mostly use IMDB to check out latest movie reviews or maybe you prefer Yahoo! and even MSN (unless you are working for Microsoft, I don’t know why would anyone use this).

Yes, I know you can create your own customized search engine plugin to handle it. If you do not know how to create search plugin for Firefox, I already posted one article on doing that here and here (for IE).

This tutorial will show you how to tweak the settings so that you can search right away from the address bar using your favorite search engine.

1. First of all, open our favorite and the best browser of the world, Mozilla Firefox.
2. Place focus on address bar or press F6 shortcut key to do the same. For more shortcut keys in Firefox, click here.
3. Type about:config and hit Enter.
4. This will load a page full of configuration and settings available for Firefox browser. Most of the options are not available through menu or panels.
5. On the Filter text, type in Keyword.URL and hit Enter
6. Look at the string on Value field. This field is the search URL.
7. Based on the screen shot above, the search URL is
   • http://www.byteswired.com?s=
8. This means if I enter “Search Plugin” in my Firefox address bar, it will automatically convert to
   • http://www.byteswired.com?s=search+plugin
9. The best thing about this is you don’t even need to specify replacement character like we need to do for IE as shown on previous post.
10. If you want to modify the Value to other web site, just change the field value.
11. By default, you can start to use this settings right away. In case it doesn’t work, please make sure the keyword.enabled settings is set to true.
12. To verify the settings, perform step (3) and on Filter text, type Keyword.Enabled and hit Enter.
13. The default value is true. If it is false, searching using address bar won’t work anymore. Set to true to enable it.

That’s it, folks. Another short tutorial to enhance your browsing experience. Have fun tweaking.

For IE user who wants to tweak their browser, I already written a post about it here.