Turn the Firefox location bar into Google search

A few months ago, when I typed something completely irrelevant in the location bar of Firefox, it would take me to Google search results. When I typed something like "facebook", it would take me to www.facebook.com.

I found out that I can turn my location bar into a search box. But this is not what I want as it always goes to the Google search results. I want it to be that way if I type completely irrelevant.

How can I get this feature back?

Billy

Posted 2012-01-04T20:42:33.930

Reputation: 23

Answers

It appears to be a documented bug in Firefox (9.0.1 at this time) that the "Domain guessing" feature is not working before the search keywords as it should be.

https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=503171

jhcaiced

Posted 2012-01-04T20:42:33.930

Reputation: 1 488

Wow, I feel so happy now that It was a bug. How did you even know that!? Thanks! – Billy – 2012-01-05T01:48:21.883

One of the following methods should work when Firefox cannot resolve to a domain:

About:config
Set the value of keyword.URL to http://www.google.com/search?q=
Google Public DNS
Set your DNS servers to 8.8.8.8 and 8.8.4.4.

iglvzx

Posted 2012-01-04T20:42:33.930

Reputation: 21 611

It is already set to http://www.google.com/search?q= But as I stated in the question, this is not what I want. Since, with this configurations, when I type "facebook", it takes me to the google search results of the keyword "facebook" but I want it to go to www.facebook.com because this is something very known. I want it to take me to google search results when I type, for example, "pencil" as there is no widely known URL correlated with this keyword.

– Billy – 2012-01-04T23:32:29.877

How about the 2nd method? – iglvzx – 2012-01-04T23:49:08.160

I can't try it because my DNS servers are fixed. If I change, my internet won't work. – Billy – 2012-01-05T00:17:11.517