I have started using Linux as my main system which means I’m using Firefox as my Web browser. All good, but the default search engine is Yahoo. Yahoo!? How do I change it to Google?
Props on switching into the world of Linux. As someone who has been involved with Linux and Unix for many, many years, it sure ain’t your mom’s Unix interface any more. Much more elegant, much easier to work with, and tons of great programs to duplicate 99% of the functionality of Windows and Mac systems. You can even get Google Chrome for Linux systems!
But let’s go about this differently. Let’s say you’re helping your son with a report for school, a report about… ohh… baby aardvarks. Yep, and you will learn, they’re insanely cute too, so this’ll be fun.
You start up Firefox in your Linux system and head to Google.com. Logical:
You can use the Google search box, but Firefox has its own “Search” on the toolbar and that’s where you really want to get things working. A search for “baby aardvark” and, well, it’s not what you want:
As you can see, the default here in Firefox is Yahoo. Probably some sponsorship money changed hands for that to remain the default for the Firefox browser, but that’s another story entirely. Suffice to say, we can change that!
To do so, click in the search box on the toolbar and bring up the search tips menu:
As you can see, Yahoo Search offers a number of interesting suggestions (though, please, do not have a wild creature like an aardvark as a pet, however cute it is!) but what you really want is at the very bottom: “Change Search Settings“.
Click on “Change Search Settings” and…
Here you can see that Yahoo is the default and switch it to Google, Bing, Amazon.com (if you’re really into shopping!) DuckDuckGo, Twitter or even Wikipedia. Choose which you prefer – Google, in your case – and close this tab. Now your default search engine is changed to Google, as shown when we do yet another search for “baby aardvark”:
And yes, aren’t they crazy cute??