Firefox keeps switching to yahoo when I want google

Question

I am using firefox 7.0.1. and noticed that it kept on defaulting to using yahoo as its search engine. I then tried selecting "Manage search engines..." and deleted all of them other than google. Sadly when I shut firefox down and restarted it, yahoo was added to the list and was the default. I have no idea how to stop this.

Answer 1

Just discovered it was caused by the pdfforge toolbar. Uninstalling it removed the problem.

Answer 2

Just had the same issue despite pdfforge toolbar being disabled (and I can't seem to uninstall it).

The magic about:config item that does this seems to be keyword.URL:

Changing the Internet Keyword service

You can specify any valid URL to perform the Internet Keyword searches by modifying the keyword.URL preference in the about:config page:

To use the Browse by Name service from in earlier versions of Firefox, keyword.URL can be set to http://www.google.com/search?ie=UTF-8&sourceid=navclient&gfns=1&q=. Google will forward you to the relevant site if it finds a clear match. Otherwise, the search results page will be displayed.

To use Yahoo!, set keyword.URL to http://search.yahoo.com/search?p=, Bing, set it to http://www.bing.com/search?q= and so on. To reset the Internet Keyword service to use a standard Google search, right-click on keyword.URL and select Reset.