Change the default search engine in IE via reigstry

Posted on August 17, 2009 at 5:09 am

If you are under a corporate network that has its own implementation of IE settings – most likely your default search engine is Live Search (now called Bing). You can verify this by opening IE and entering a search term in the search box at the upper right side of the IE window.

In the example below I typed “utah jazz” and the result comes out at the main part of the IE window:

As you can see bing is my default search engine – so how do we change this so that we could set Google as the default search engine or some other site? This is easy to do and can be done by a simple registry trick. First let’s create a reg file that will contain commands to insert keys into the Windows registry.

Open Notepad then type everyting below:

CODE
REGEDIT4

[HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Internet Explorer\Main]
“Search Page”=”http://www.google.com”
“Search Bar”=”http://www.google.com/ie”

[HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Internet Explorer\SearchURL]
“”=”http://www.google.com/keyword/%s”

[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Internet Explorer\Search]
“SearchAssistant”=”http://www.google.com/ie”

Save the file as “google.reg” – make sure to include the double quotes otherwise it will only be saved as .txt file:

Browse the folder then double click the file. At the prompt click YES:

This will change your IE’s default search engine to Google. Try using the same trick above for your other search engines! You only need to use the registry hack when the Administrator has locked down the computer and you can’t chnage the settings via the GUI interface. Enjoy!