Rex asks: I love Chrome because I can search anything from the address bar itself. Can I add the functionality of searching from Address Bar in Firefox too?
Most of the web browsers today handle invalid URL input as a query string and search for it using default search engine provided. Firefox is a bit different, it uses Google search engine to find the best match to the query and redirects the user to the first result returned by Google , somewhat similar to Google’s “I am feeling Lucky” feature.Having said that there is a trick by which you can modify Firefox configuration to return search results instead of auto redirecting to web pages. Here is step by step procedure.
Step 1: Load Firefox
Step 2: Type “about:config” in the address bar and click enter.
Step 3: Ignore the warning and click “I will be careful , I promise!”
Step 4: In the filter text box at the top of screen type “keyword.url”
Step 5: Double Click on the keyword.url. It will open a pop up window asking you to “Enter String Value”
Step 6: Default string value is “about:neterror?e=query&u=”. To display search results , you need to replace the String with one of the following strings as per your favorite search engine.
Google: http://www.google.com/search?q=
Google Search (I’m feeling Lucky):http://www.google.com/search?btnI=I%27m+Feeling+Lucky&q=
Yahoo: http://search.yahoo.com/search?p=
Bing: http://www.bing.com/search?q=
Ask: http://www.ask.com/web?q=
AltaVista: http://www.altavista.com/web/results?itag=ody&q=
AOL Search: http://search.aol.com/aol/search?s_it=searchbox.webhome&q=
Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Search?fulltext=Search&search=
6: Click OK when you are done.
Lets test it
Yeps its working 
To restore it back of default just follow the same process and enter “about:neterror?e=query&u=” when asked for String Value.
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{ 12 comments… read them below or add one }
Thank you, thank you for explaining this so clearly, you would be amazed at how many bad articles I had to skim through before I got this. I love the Google “feeling lucky” option in the address bar. I use when I’m looking for a specific company web site, and it invariably brings me to the correct place, I use the regular Google search box when doing a search to find multiple articles on a topic. Anyway, I lost it yesterday. I had d/l an updated version of AIM and AOL totally and and sneakily hijacked my browser and took over that address bar search (that surely can’t be legal?). So whenever I tried to use the addy bar, instead of taking me to the site I wanted, it would give me a list of sites via the AOL search engine. Ugh. So then when I tried to figure out how to get it back, I went to – where else — Google and searched for this problem. Apparently this happens a lot as there were quite a few articles on the topic, with writers trying to answer questions from people upset at losing the Google option (and it looks like Yahoo is another major offender of hijacking the function). But unfortunately many of the articles were either ridiculously confusing, or worse, the writer didn’t even seem too understand the problem, and thought people were trying to figure out how to add a Google search box to the browser toolbar, some were even just explaining how to make Google your home page. So thanks for the concise info.
The Omni Bar extention does this too, without the coding….
Thanks so very much. I had forgotten how to correct this problem.
Great Tip — by the way this works on Firefox 4 (beta 7) as well –
I wonder how to find out thoes url of search engine. I mean “Google: http://www.google.com/search?q=” for example.
Thank you so much for this! The ‘I’m feeling lucky’ address bar search was removed when I started using Firefox Four, and this got it back for me!
Thanks so much!
Solid, thanks! I actually used this to fix an issue with a leftover McAfee “Safe Search” entry. And I’m digging it!
Thx for the article. Finally I can get rid of the search in Bing that it was forced on me when I installed the Bing toolbar in IE (yeah, IE, not firefox: but it changed this option in FF too
).
Thanks a lot for this… in Firefox 4 the default keyword:URL points to some directory in your Program Files and tries to load up JARs or something. Why they changed such a useful thing by default I have no idea, but I have mistakenly typed a search into the address bar at least 20 times in the week I’ve had this browser. lol.
Thanks. This was really useful.
Thank you a billion times over! I somehow managed to turn on this setting accidentally on my old PC, and when I moved to a new one I was perplexed and saddened by the lack of magicalness in my new browser. Now it’s all better and I can continue putting a minimum of effort into finding youtube videos!
Twice my URL bar had been hijacked, once by some engine I forgot and then by Ask.
I’ve been looking for this solution on and off for months and finally found it! Wow thanks so much!