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I have just installed Chromium and am attempting to set the default search engine to a site of my choosing. Unfortunately, it doesn't seem to work.

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Originally in the first category there were 4 engines, and now it occurs to me that I could have just changed the url of one of them and then set them as default. However, I already deleted them and can't find a way of restoring them.

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3 Answers 3

Reset to default
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I think you're confusing "Default search engine" with "Default search engines", which in all fairness is an easy mistake. The default search engines are those that come preinstalled on Chromium. From your question ("how to set"), I'm assuming you just want to change what search engine is used when you type something in the bar on top and hit enter. To do that,

  1. Make a random search with your desired search engine and copy the URL
  2. Click "ADD" and paste the URL, replacing the random search terms with %s
  3. Click the three dots and click "Make default"
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  • That's possibly the least intuitive UX I've come across. Thanks for the help.
    – Sean Reid
    Commented Jan 7, 2023 at 16:51
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    That looked so easy, but as Kevin Fraser mentioned, the words "Make Default" are greyed out. While I appreciate his workaround, it's a pain and I want to make that horrendous but effective Google to be the default search engine...
    – Abisdad
    Commented Feb 22, 2023 at 23:52
  • @Abisdad Check again if the input is valid. E.g. I accidentally wrote % instead of %s, which grayed the entry out.
    – Nils Lindemann
    Commented Aug 30, 2023 at 13:35
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This is a variant of Michael Kolber's answer, specific to making Google an option for default search engine. This is what worked for me in Chromium 113 on Linux Mint:

  1. type chrome://settings/searchEngines in your address bar (or navigate to it through hamburger > "settings" > "search engine" > "manage search engines and site search"
  2. Next to "Site Search" click the "Add" button (not next to "Search engines" where you would think it would be)
  3. in the dialog box that pops up: for "Search engine" enter "Google", for "Shortcut" enter "google", for "URL with %s in place of query" enter "https://www.google.com/search?q=%s"
  4. press the "Add" button in the dialog box. This will add Google as an option to "Site search" (not where you wanted it!) so
  5. click on the hamburger menu on the newly added Google row and choose "Make default". This will move Google from the "Site search" section to the "Search engines" section and also will set Google as your new default search engine. (if you just wanted Google as a search engine option, but not the default, then you have to manually reset your default engine to the one you wanted)
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  • It works too for Version 116.0.5845.96 (Official Build) built on Debian 12.1, running on Debian 12.1 (64-bit)
    – John Goofy
    Commented Aug 19, 2023 at 13:00
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In Chromium the words 'Make Default' is greyed out so one cant change the default search engine to Google. A work around is to make your home page google.com . This way, one can just open a new Tab to do Google search.

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    – Community Bot
    Commented Jan 7, 2022 at 12:50
  • If it's my own computer why can't I change the default search engine? That's not what I would expect from the "free" OS. We already know why it's greyed out and we want a workaround to disable it.
    – Gherman
    Commented Aug 28, 2023 at 22:25

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