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Jeroen W. Pluimers on .NET, C#, Delphi, databases, and personal interests

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Forcing Chrome to use google.com as search engine

Posted by jpluimers on 2017/04/14

I tried the obvious things to force Chrome on my Mac and Windows to use google.com as search engine when searching through the address/search box (omnibox). On Windows, this works fine, but Chrome on Mac (both are linked through my gmail account) keeps insisting to use google.nl no matter what, as all these fail:

There are tons of reports on the google.com/ncr not working (you see the https://google.nl domain, in that search right?).

For me, google.com/ncr redirects to https://www.google.com/?gws_rd=ssl, so it does redirect, but somehow doesn’t mark it to use as default.

In Chrome, my search settings in chrome://settings/searchEngines are these:

Google (Default) search settings

Google (Default) search settings

I’ve never changed it, so it still points to {google:baseURL}search?q=%s&{google:RLZ}{google:originalQueryForSuggestion}{google:assistedQueryStats}{google:searchFieldtrialParameter}{google:searchClient}{google:sourceId}{google:instantExtendedEnabledParameter}{google:contextualSearchVersion}ie={inputEncoding}

So basically, Chrome screws up the {google:baseURL} portion and there is no way to force {google:baseURL} to a certain value as the 2008 bug 1521 was marked “wontfix” in 2010 and nobody at Google seems to care (except a Google employee wanting expense paid trips abroad).

The totally odd thing is that when I start on https://google.com then search for say “Mac OS X start second atom instance”, I get to https://www.google.com/#q=Mac+OS+X+start+second+atom+instance

Poor mans solution

So I’ve defined two new search engine settings:

When Google.com lets you down, force it to use Google.com

When Google.com lets you down, force it to use Google.com

In case you want to copy the text:

I’ve set the “Google.com Simple” as my default. Makes URLs a lot simpler too.

Now if I start typing google and press the space bar, the ombibox changes from

into

and I can search for foo like this:

which brings me to:

https://www.google.com/#q=foo

https://www.google.com/#q=foo

–jeroen

Google is already in English, and I don't want Google.nl

Google is already in English, and I don’t want Google.nl

This entry was posted on 2017/04/14 at 06:00 and is filed under Chrome, Google, Power User. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

2 Responses to “Forcing Chrome to use google.com as search engine”

  1. Mike Yo said

    2017/07/16 at 16:12

    Nice, but breaks search suggest…

    Reply

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