Windows 10 search with Google instead of Bing

[TheReal]

Hi there,
Windows 10 has this nice search feature in the taskbar. However searching with this will always use Bing. Firefox natively redirects your search to your preferred search engine to circumvent this. I think Google Chrome does too. Thing is, if you are using Edge as browser, you are stuck with Bing. Would it be possible to make an AdGuard addon that automatically redirects searches from the Windows taskbar to Google?

 

[Boo Berry]

Thing is, if you are using Edge as browser, you are stuck with Bing.

Not true, if you go to Google's page then open Edge's advanced settings, there's an option to change the default search engine. Mine's set to Google there.

As for your request, this likely isn't possible. Attempting to do this would likely break parts of Windows 10. I'd say you could try to use the HOSTS file to redirect Bing to Google, but I've read that Windows 10 will ignore Bing entries in the HOSTS file.

 

[TheReal]

It's true that you can change the search engine in Edge. But I was talking about the taskbar search in Windows 10: http://imgur.com/6C8t385

Searching with it will always end up in a Bing search, regardless of your browser settings. Shortly after Windows 10 came out, both Firefox and Chrome added a function to circumvent this.

 

[avatar]

In theory - everything is possible. But this will be really-really hard to do if we'll intercept bing searches and replace with a google response.

How exactly did Chrome circumvent this?

 

[TheReal]

Seems like Chrome doesn't has this feature natively. But there is an addon that does exactly what I described. Here's the github of this addon, I guess you can see there how it works. https://github.com/TheoBr/Chrometana

Firefox however does indeed have this feature natively, exclusively for searches comming from the taskbar. So there seems to be some way to detect if a search request comes from the taskbar.

 

[avatar]

Oh, so they do this on browser-level.

Yep, that's possible to do the same with a userscript.

Try this:
https://cdn.adguard.com/public/Userscripts/Misc/redirect.bing.google.user.js

Don't forget to disable "Do not block useful ads" in Adguard's settings.

Also while making that userscript, i have found a bug:
https://github.com/AdguardTeam/AdguardForWindows/issues/566

For some reason userscripts do not work on bing search page in MS Edge.

 

[Boo Berry]

Won't you need to be filtering Cortana's processes to get this to work correctly or not?

 

[avatar]

No, this is a very simple userscript, that redirects ALL bing searches to Google.

When you click "Search the web" in Cortana, it opens Bing search which in turn gets immediately redirected to Google.

 

[TheReal]

I've tried your script with AdGuard 5.1 and now with the 6.0 RC but it's not working. Bing searches still end up at Bing.

 

[avatar]

I've updated the userscript, now it should work in RC.

 

[TheReal]

Cool, it works now indeed. Many thanks! This makes the searchbar in Windows 10 so much more usefull.

 

[avatar]

Cool, it works now indeed. Many thanks! This makes the searchbar in Windows 10 so much more usefull.

You're welcome

 

[TheReal]

I'm now on RC2 and the script seems to no longer work. ^.^

 

[steve1209]

I just tried it with RC2 it seems to work for me when I did a couple searches from Win 10 search box, I got google! Like it!!

 

[avatar]

I'm now on RC2 and the script seems to no longer work. ^.^

Hm, could it be that userful ads filter is enabled?

 

[TheReal]

That was it. Once I disabled it, the addon worked again. Totally forgot about that setting.