Change the default search engine in Internet explorer

AddThis Feed Button

May 5th, 2004 Leave a comment Visited 87 times, 3 so far today

Default search engine of Microsoft Internet explorer is MSN. But there are better search engines available. I like yahoo.com and you may have your own preference. Recently I came across article that indicated how to change the default search engine through registry. Open registry editor by going to START-RUN and entering regedit and navigate to following three keys separately and change it as shown below:

[HKEY_CURRENT_USERSoftwareMicrosoftInternet ExplorerMain]
“Search Page”=”http://www.google.com”
“Search Bar”=”http://www.google.com/ie”
[HKEY_CURRENT_USERSoftwareMicrosoftInternet ExplorerSearchURL]
“”=”http://www.google.com/keyword/%s”
[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINESOFTWAREMicrosoftInternet ExplorerSearch]
“SearchAssistant”=”http://www.google.com/ie”

(This example is specific to google but there is a Microsoft article that I found on their support site which described show to do it for many other engines. Read all of it at: http://support.microsoft.com/directory/article.asp?ID=KB;EN-US;q198279)





TechWhack on Facebook

This website uses IntenseDebate comments, but they are not currently loaded because either your browser doesn't support JavaScript, or they didn't load fast enough.

One Comment

  1. #
    Chuck
    August 27th, 2005 at 9:41 pm

    Very useful tip. Thanks.
    Only caveat. My registry did not contain the last key:

    HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINESOFTWAREMicrosoftInternet ExplorerSearch

    However, it wasn’t needed. The changes to the other keys did the trick. Thanks for the great tip!

    Reply to this comment

Leave a Comment

Related Posts

Popular Posts

blank