I like Bing for a number of reasons. If you don’t prefer Bing, this is not a sales pitch to make you change your search habits. I’ll leave that to the Bing team with BING IT ON, the Bing Challenge commercials et al. Bing offers a better user experience. I also believe Microsoft has better privacy policies and by using Bing as the primary search engine, I reduce my exposure to Google.
One of the first things I do when I get a new computer or OS up and running – download Firefox (I constantly use both browsers for a number of reasons, testing the excellent cross-browser compatibility offered by Exchange 2010 and later being one of them), and change the default search engine in Firefox to Bing.
It’s fairly easy to make Bing the default search engine for the Search bar in Firefox. However, like me, if you also type search terms directly in the browser’s address bar, you may want to switch the Firefox address bar to use Bing as well. The Firefox address bar uses Google by default.
To change the default search engine for the Firefox address bar to Bing:
- Open a new tab and type about:config in the address bar.
You’ll get a warning stating This might void your warranty! But Firefox is free, and comes with no warranties, you say! You’re right, there are no warranties. It’s a joke. Click I’ll be careful, I promise! button and move on.
- In the Search bar on the config page, type Keyword.Url and hit Enter.
- Double click Keyword.Url and type http://www.bing.com/search?q= and then click OK.
Test by typing search keywords in the address bar.
{ 1 comment… read it below or add one }
I don’t know how old this article is, but I just tried both directions and were unable to access bing. The first told me my browser doesn’t support it, use Firefox or IE. I use Firefox. The about:config search brought up nothing. I’ll go to MSN and see if it’s available there. They used to “shove it down your throat”.