DEMO: Default Search Engine

Search engines

A search engine is what we use to be able to find the resources online that we're looking for. We type something into Google and do a search — that is a search engine. And you can choose what your default search engine is.

Checking the default in each browser

I'm on the demo machine, and watch what happens when I hit Chrome. I'm going to open up Chrome and it says "search Google or type URL". So, search Google — that's my search engine, is Google.

Let's go ahead and open up Firefox. Very different browser here, made by a different company, but notice what it says here. I'm going to select "not now". Notice it says "search with Google or enter an address". So once again it's using Google as the search engine.

Let's take a look at Edge. I'm going to hit the Windows key here and type in Edge and hit enter, and it's going to pop up. It just says "search for web", doesn't really tell us what we're searching for, but let's search for something. I'm just going to do "hello", and notice it says Microsoft Bing. The search engine we just used was Microsoft Bing.

Notice, a Windows 11 machine, which is Microsoft, wants to use their product for browsing, which is Edge, which wants to use their actual search engine, which is Microsoft Bing. They want you to stay with them because they make a lot of money off of this. And look how cluttered all of their feedback is. I'm not a big fan of how cluttered Microsoft makes their stuff, and it's because they make a lot of money off of it. They want to put more stuff in front of you so you can click their ads, and a lot of this stuff is all sponsored stuff.

Changing the default search engine

If we want to change that — say we don't want to give Microsoft any more money than we already have — what I can do is go into settings and search for engine. Then we see right here, here's the search and address bar and search. So we're going to click on that, and now we've got this drop down list. We can change it from Bing to, maybe we want to do Google, and now we can use Google instead, which is my preference. I like Google as a search engine, and most people do — most people use Google as the number one search engine that's out there.

We can change that in all of these apps too. So if I come into here, I can go to the settings here and do the same thing. We'll search for search engine, and it's using Google. Drop down, I can use something else.

But realize that Google makes a ton of money off of their search engine. That's actually the biggest way that Google makes money, is because they're selling advertising space. So you get to choose what your default search engine is going to be.