Stopping FF3’s “intelligent” address bar search “feeling lucky”

So, after 2 weeks of putting up with it I have finally delved into Firefox’s settings to find the root of the “problem”.

Now when I say problem, I really mean annoyance. The annoyance being Firefox redirecting to the first result when using the new address bar to search. The first result is generally correct which is fine when you just need an answer quickly, but when it is not there is no quick way of jumping back to a listing of other search results… well, not that I can find.

Yes, I do know there is a dedicated google search bar, but what if you turn this off any just want to search using the address bar?

The Solution

After poking around in Preferences and about:config and not finding any options relating to the first search result, I had a play with the google search url under keyword.URL, and after remove unnecessary values in the url it works like I would expect it to… displaying the entire search results for every search.

The new value I set for keyword.URL being:

http://www.google.co.nz/search?ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8&q=

After doing some testing it seems the GET string of sourceid=navclient&gfns=1 tells Google to redirect to the first result’s url if it looks like a likely candidate.

Life is good once more.

4 Comments

  1. I’m having some problems with my Fox. When I type a keyword in the status bar, it no longer searches with Google search engine but Yahoo!?!
    Could you help me set the default search engine to Google? :(
    P.S: i am not talking about the search engine on top-right corner (Ctrl + K) but the “intelligent address bar”.
    Many thanks

  2. Hi Zhang,

    Sounds like the configuration keyword.URL in your about:config has been modified. Type in about:config into your address bar and change the value to http://www.google.com/search?ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8&q= or something similar.

    Hope that helps and thanks for visiting!

    Aaron

  3. I’ve change the value of keyword.URL to “http://www.google.com/search?btnI=I%27m+Feeling+Lucky&q=” and it works. :)
    thanks for your hint.

  4. there’s another problem from my friend. Her FF is always reload pages when we switch between tabs.

    this means, you have two tabs, when you switch this to that, that’ll be reloaded and so the other is.

    could you tell me how to deal with this trouble? :(


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