Searching a single term from Firefox address bar

Question

I've edited keyword.url to my favorite search engine and disabled domain autocomplete, but Firefox still tries to connect to invalid domains when I type a single word in the address bar (like http://foo/ for foo) instead of using my search engine directly. How to fix this?

Answer 1

This behavior is normal – foo may be a valid hostname in the local network or under the same domain (for example, after appending the primary suffix – home. or example.com. – or by using NetBIOS to resolve it). Even on the Internet, a single-label domain is valid – http://tk./ and the (now dead) http://to./ as examples. Therefore Firefox (and probably all other programs) will always consider one-word addresses as domain names.

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You can, as a workaround, use keyword search: click the search engines drop-down menu, choose "Edit search engines", then edit your keywords.

Another way is to add a bookmark pointing to your search engine. For example, I have keyword g with URL http://www.google.com/search?q=%s which I use daily.

Answer 2

Setting browser.fixup.alternate.enabled to false in about:config is supposed to disable domain guessing. Sadly, Firefox 5.0 still returns the failed DNS request.

Answer 3

The InstantFox extesion has all advanced search features that I need.

Answer 4

Well, I had that problem for couple of weeks and I could not figure it out. I just noticed that when I use the computer on another network (at work) - it was fine. Clean profiles, everything default, plugins off - nothing was fixing the behavior.

Then I recall that I have changed some setting on the DNS on my home router to provide local domain names (that actually did not work as I expected).

So, when I removed that option I was able to search single words from the address bar in FF again!!!