This tutorial will show you how to set the default search engine in Firefox to one of your choosing

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Introduction:

You will probably prefer one search engine over another. This tutorial will show you how to set default search engine in firefox to whichever one you choose.

Step # 1 -- Opening Firefox Configuration

Start Firefox. In this example we can see that the default search engine is Yahoo! as any search terms typed into the address bar will run through this search engine. Click in the address bar and type "about:config", press return. A message will appear, click the, "I'll be careful, I promise!" button.

Step # 2 -- Search for the Correct Field

This will give you access to the configuration files in Firefox. In the "Search" box at the top you need to type in "Keyword". This will narrow the list down to three fields. The one we are interested in is "keyword.URL", as you can see it has "search.yahoo.com" as its value.

Step # 3 -- Changing the String Value

In order to change the field you need to double click on "keyword.URL". This will open a window called "Enter string value", you can see here that the value is set to Yahoo! Delete this text and you need to enter the value for your new search engine, in this case Google. Type "http://www.google.com/search?&q=" and click "OK". That is how to set default search engine in firefox.

Step # 4 -- Checking the Change

To make sure that the changes have gone ahead, type a new search term into the address bar. You should now see that Firefox runs the search through the Google search engine, rather than Yahoo!