http://blog.taragana.com/index.php/archive/how-to-change-your-firefox-location-bar-search-engine/

If you, like me, has been the victim of Yahoo Spyware aka Yahoo IM then you may notice that in the firefox location bar if you type in a keyword, it takes you to Yahoo preferences page. Previously it used to perform a Google “I’m Lucky” Search and take you to the first page of its search results automatically.

If you want to restore the Google “I’m Lucky” search then perform this simple steps:
1. Type about:config in Firefox location bar and press Enter
2. Type keyword in Filter textbox and you will see only the preference keyword.URL.
3. Double-click on keyword.URL and change the value to: http://www.google.com/search?btnI=I%27m+Feeling+Lucky&q=

That’s all it takes to restore default keyword search functionality in Google.

Note: You can use this to change to any search engine for keyword search.

http://www.labnol.org/software/browsers/prevent-opendns-google-redirects-firefox-address-bar-ie/2662/

… and followed its directions. It worked. The thing goes to Google again.

And I know how to make it go elsewhere.

As for why this happened, maybe David Ulevitch can explain. It’s not clear to me why I’ve been using OpenDNS for a long time and this behavior just cropped up.

David’s response above suggested that OpenDNS does not hack about:config. But something did. What?

Meanwhile, thanks, everybody.

Since you’ve mentioned you’d gladly pay for an alternative, you might like to look at the ‘Recursive DNS’ service available from DynDNS.com … about $30 a year and no know address munging or proxying!

You are paying OpenDNS already … with your attention … BTW!

Mic

David Ulevitch and the rest of the world disagree on the appropriate OpenDNS behavior for Google results.

David has generated enormous amounts of ill will among the more technically savvy in the audience by persisting in this proxying and Google DNS result munging, but appears to be indifferent to the effects.

From my point of view (given the alternatives) I have to put up with his response, but it hurts me every time I see the effects.

Frankly, if you care about the politics of openness and privacy, you should support another DNS provider, but we all know how hard they are to find.

Ergh!

The default value is set in a file called “locale/browser-region/region.properties”, which is contained in “chrome/en-US.jar” in your Firefox install directory (/usr/lib/firefox-3.0.1 in my case).

So, in theory, you could:

1) Close Firefox
2) Unzip that jar file
3) Edit region.properties
4) Zip the jar file up with the edited file, and copy the jar back to the chrome directory
5) Open Firefox

(I said it wasn’t pretty)

But meanwhile, I’m suspicious because of “keyword.URL’ not existing in the desired browser’s about:config. So I’m wondering if add-ons can delete those default values.

(and my suggestion about setting a value as “default” was just a guess, and clearly a bad one)

Arg. Didn’t. Still going to OpenDNS search. Lemme go back to about:config…

Okay, now I have three entries. (Separated by semicolons, they are Preference Name; Status; Type; Value.)

1) keyword.URL; user set; string; http://www.google.com/search?ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8&sourceid=navclient&gfns=1&q=

2) keyword.enabled; default; boolean; true

3) keyword.URL; user set; string; http://www.google.com/search?ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8&sourceid=navclient&gfns=1&q=

Before this, there was no preference that started with the letter k. On the Mac, that is. On the Lenovo running Linux, #s 1 and 2 are there.

I don’t know how to eliminate any of those. I seem to be able to modify only the value.