Andrés Villenas

Software Engineering, .Net Development, Sitecore, and more fun.

How to change the default search engine in Chromium-base Edge

Today, Microsoft just released a Microsoft Edge Insider Channels page where you can download the latest version of this new browser entirely based on Chromium.

The page offers two different channel versions. The Canary Channel version is automatically built every night and may have some defects. The Dev Channel version is released every week, and the Edge team tests it. Therefore, it is more stable than the Canary version. 

This new browser was customized to use the Microsoft services where possible. For instance, the search engine by default is Bing which may not be your choice for searching every day. Fortunately, you can change it by visiting the Settings page at edge://settings/search. You may have to visit the Google home page, so Edge detects that there is a search engine available.

If Edge detected the Google Search engine correctly, then, it will appear in the Search engine used in the address bar. If the Google engine doesn't show up, you can use the Manage search engines option to add it manually.

Here is the value to use at the URL with %s in place of query field: 

{google:baseURL}search?q=%s&{google:RLZ}{google:originalQueryForSuggestion}{google:assistedQueryStats}{google:searchFieldtrialParameter}{google:iOSSearchLanguage}{google:searchClient}{google:sourceId}{google:contextualSearchVersion}ie={inputEncoding}

Then, Edge will use Google to search from the address bar.

That's it for today.

Until the next post.