How to Change Default Search Engine in Chrome?

When comes to browsing Internet, it’s all about speed and how fast you get things done. The popular browser Google Chrome offers lot of tricks to get things done. You don’t need to go to google.com or bing.com every time for searching the information. Chrome’s omnibox address bar uses Google as a default search engine and allows you to directly search from the address bar. In this article let us explain how to change the default search engine in Chrome and manage other possibilities.

Changing Default Search Engine

Go to “chrome://settings/” URL in the address bar and scroll down to “Search engine” section.

The first option is “Search engine used in the address bar” and Chrome by default uses Google search engine. Click on the dropdown to see the available search engines list. You will see Google, Yahoo!, Bing, Ask and AOL.

Choose your favorite search engine and that will be used in the address bar search henceforth.

Adding New Search Engine

Don’t worry if you don’t find your local and favorite search engine listed in the list. Click on the second option – “Manage search engines”. You will see two section as shown in the below screen. The first section will show the “Default search engines” with more details like query URL and keyword. From here also you can click on the three dots button against any of the search engines and make it as default. You can also simply remove the search engine from the list.

The second section is – “Other search engines” which will allow you to add your favorite search engine to the list. Click on the “Add” button and enter the required details. You need to enter the name, keyword and query URL. For example, you can enter Baidu search engine URL as https://www.baidu.com without any query like below.

After adding the search engine it should look like below under the “Other search engines” section.

Using Address Bar Search in Chrome

In our earlier article, we have already explained how to use omnibox in Chrome in detail. Basically Chrome will use the default search engine in the address bar for searching without going to search engine website. Enter any search query in the address bar, let us enter ‘google’ for example. You will see the search option with your default search engine like below, Bing search in this case.

Clicking or selecting on that option will open the Bing search showing the results for the query you have entered in the address bar.

When entering any of the search engines site on the address bar, Chrome will show you an option to search directly. For example, when you enter google.com, you will see “Press tab to search Google” option like below:

Pressing tab or spacebar will change the address bar into search box starting with “Search Google |”. You can enter the search query and hit enter to open Google with the search results of the entered keywords.

You can also directly enter “Search Google | Keyword” to get the search results for the keyword.