Microsoft’s new web browser is configured to use Bing as the default search engine. Here’s how to change it.
If in the past Microsoft Edge was not unanimous, the new version of Microsoft’s web browser should be a game-changer. Built on Chromium, the open source version of Google Chrome, Edge Chromium is much faster than in the past and should change the minds of the most reluctant.
Microsoft’s new browser borrows a large number of features from Google’s web browser, and even has the luxury of offering some new ones. Next-generation Edge is also perfectly compatible with all of the Chrome extensions available on the Chrome Web Store, and migrating data from Chrome to Edge is child’s play.
But there is one point on which the new Edge sins: Microsoft obliges, Bing, not really known for its qualities, is the search engine configured by default. However, it is possible to change them very easily and in a few clicks.
1. Go to Settings
Launch Edge on your machine, click on the main menu represented by three small dots, and go to the settings of the browser.
2. Enter the Privacy and services options
Then go to the section devoted to Confidentiality and services. Scroll through all the options, then at the bottom of the page in the Services section, enter the Address bar menu.
3. Change the default search engine
In the address bar settings page, expand the Search engine used in the address bar drop-down menu, and replace Bing with one of the other suggested search engines: Qwant, Yahoo! or even Google.
If the search engine you usually use is not in the list, you can add it manually. To do this, click on the Manage search engines menu, then on the Add button.
All you have to do is enter the name of the new search engine, as well as indicate its URL using the precise ending of the search engine followed by% s instead of the request, and validate by clicking on Save.
Adding this ending, specific to each search engine, will allow Edge to automatically launch a query on the chosen search engine when you enter a word in the address bar.
For DuckDuckGo, for example, the URL to be entered will have the form https://duckduckgo.com/?q=%s, while for Ecosia, the URL to indicate will be https://www.ecosia.org/search?q=%s. To find out the exact URL to use to add a search engine, open a browser window, run a search engine query, and copy all of the content from the URL displayed before the search term.