after i always remove al search engines except startpage, suddenly i got search result from Amazon and had to remove this with a other engine i forgot the name.
when i was trying to search from the search field in top of my browser i aspect Start page to search because that is the only engine is present in my search engine list, but after no changes from me, suddenly Amazon was there, and a other search engine i forgot the name of. How can engines come back like that I do not en did not use amazon, Some amazon trick i don't know off?
All Replies (8)
Type about:preferences#search<enter> in the address bar. You can select any search engine to be your default from here.
You can also remove any engine from here.
Thank you for thinking with me, that is not the problem, I only use Startpage the rest is removed in the list So i only got on searchengine and that leaves the default no other choice, i was wondering how that Amazon search can come back while i never use/used amazon.
Different localized installations of Firefox include different pre-enabled search engines. Usually when you uncheck some of them or Remove some of them on the Options/Preferences page, your change is remembered going forward and survives updates. (I haven't seen Amazon or eBay listed there for a long time.)
However, from time to time we hear from users that used Remove for ALL engines except their default, and after some time, all of the others got restored after an update. If you run into this problem often, U suggest finding one that is less offensive to you, like Wikipedia, leave that in the list and un-check it in the left column rather than removing it and see whether that is more stable.
Aaa right ,so this could happen, its not amazon forcing on me.. ok not recurring (for now) , and thanks for the (i'm i crazy or not) info :) take care!
If this happens again, please could you let us know the name of the of the other engines that appear. That might be useful in working out what's happening here.
We are trying to identify the root cause at the moment, we have one fix in the release process that might help this.
There seem to be seven default search engines (which are individual add-ons, IIRC) included with a fresh Firefox installation, as of FF75. These are:
Amazon.com Bing DuckDuckGo ebay Google Twitter Wikipedia
and for various reasons, I would like to remove ALL of them, and add one, maybe two or three, default search engines of my own choosing and not have to worry about any of the above defaults showing up in an updated or new release of Firefox, EVER.
For privacy considerations alone, I figure it makes sense to not trust the seven organizations behind those search engines by default. If I want to search eBay, I can visit that site, but I stopped having anything to do with eBay years ago. Companies or organizations such as Amazon.com, Google, Twitter and Wikipedia, sell/provide goods and (information) services I USE OFTEN, but at least three of those four are notoriously nosy (read: they do not respect users' privacy) and the other is not all that organized to begin with, so as much as I like and find Wikipedia useful at maybe once a day (?), I would rather open a new window to search it.
Bing is not something I use except as a last resort when I am trying to find a mainstream search engine which might not be as biased in some way as the most well-known search engine is. Google Search is often the foundation for other search tools which attempt to make it more respectful of privacy, run faster, etc. I like DuckDuckGo but it drops all the timestamp information related to the hits it returns, which makes it less than helpful when I want to skim through results looking for those from a certain time frame.
I actually use Twitter now that it seems to be POTUS' means of choice for communicating directly with the People of the United States of America (and most of the rest of the world, if one is realistic), when he does not want waste a lot of time and effort to make a comment at a formal or even impromptu press conference.
The problem I keep having is that after I have tried various means of removing (almost) all of the default search engines in Firefox, and maybe adding a couple of specialized ones that are typically metasearch providers. Within a matter of weeks, all of the Mozilla standard default search engines show up again.
Besides that major problem, the issue of not having a simple, straightforward way to create new search engine add-ons of my own means it is difficult to, for example, create several custom Google Searches which have different focuses and thus may be much more efficient for specialized purposes; looking for recent news about a particular pandemic but excluding all but a few sources and restricting the results to a narrow time frame.
Modified by TMG
Hi TMG, I don't know exactly why some users experience "removed" search engines returning. However, users have observed over the years that if they remove ALL of the built-in search engines, at the next update, this may be viewed as a sign of corruption and all of them will be restored. I suggest keeping at least one of them in the box. Of course you can remove the checkmark from it in the box so it doesn't clutter your list.
Regarding custom search engines, you could start a new thread on that, but I'll mention an extension to help generate search engines with custom URLs:
https://addons.mozilla.org/firefox/addon/search-engines-helper/
Hi TMG, assuming you use the remove button in the preferences display, next to the "One-click search engines", then yes, we definitely shouldn't be unhiding them on update.
I've actually been working on trying to solve these issues over the last couple of months as there have been various reports. There's a few changes that have gone into 75 that might help and more in the pipeline.