Tuesday, February 3, 2009

Howto Change Macintosh Safari's default search engine

This article describes a way of changing Safari's default search engine. This instruction assumes you are familiar with the vi text editor. First, quit Safari and make a backup copy of the application. Then follow these steps:

To add to all the above:

To change the default from www.google.com to www.ixquick.com do the following:

Fire up Terminal and cd to
/Applications/Safari.app/Contents/MacOS

copy (cp) the file Safari to Safari.old (in case you make a mistake)

Edit the Safari file with vi or your favorite editor:
vi Safari

search for the string:
http://%@.google.com/%@?q=%@&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8
And replace it with:
http://%@.ixquick.com/do/metasearch.pl?&query=%@

Make sure the string is exact (it has the same length as the original string).

Save the file and quit the editor.

Fire up Safari

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