Adding custom search engines

[maria2101]

I still miss the ability to add a custom search engine in Firefox Desktop, which has been there in Firefox for Android for years. Kinda weird that Android has an option the desktop version lacks of. Or do I need to enable dev mode or something in the config?

Clicking "find more search engines" only leads to the addons page. On android however, you can add your own site and you can then directly search it from the address bar, for example I added https://www.m.dict.cc/?s=%s to quickly lookup dict.cc for translations, it directly searches for the word I type in.

[singhh9596]

You can manually add the search engine. Open the search engine you want, click on the address bar, and then press the '+' button at the bottom of it to add the search engine.

[memestreak]

It appears that the browser.urlbar.update2.engineAliasRefresh configuration option no longer exists in Firefox Developer Edition.

[giampi75]

Memestreak, you can add it manually

[memestreak]

Thanks, giampi75, this works!

[micseydel]

I created this account to add to the list of people who are surprised that this feature was removed. Pushing users to install addons instead seems like a risky choice re:security and privacy when there's been such a simple solution for so long.

[rzm]

I've been using https://osdgen.com/ to add custom search engines.

The reason you can't add every site that has a search is because they don't include an OpenSearch description document in the HTML. You can write and host your own OpenSearch documents like Mycroft Project  but OSDGen.com let's you generate and add them on the spot.

[deimos]

Without adding a custom search, built-in search is completely unusable in firefox. Google is broken for me, for some reason it puts results in russian first if it can, even though I don't speak it. I have to manually add /search?lr=-(lang_ru)&q= in the search bar just to be able to actually have some useful results (I use a bookmark currently). Why would you remove such a feature is beyond me. If google pays you for that in fear of people switching away from them, at least let us customize the GOOGLE search!

[Masca19]

Unbelievable that such a simple and universal option would be removed altogether from Firefox. We're talking about being able to use a custom URL on a web browser, not learning C++. I use various websites with a simple structure that do not support the opensearch.xml protocol and this feature is just essential for me.
I have used Firefox for years but now consider switching to a chromium-based browser.

[hcschuetz]

My use case:

Google seems to provide a way to change its behavior to a "classical" search by adding the (somewhat magic) query parameter "udm=14".  I'd like to add an URL template to my Firefox including that parameter (in addition to the standard Google engine).

There are workarounds such as the browser extension "udm14" or the search page udm14.com, but I'd prefer to configure this directly in Firefox so that I don't have to rely on (and trust) third parties.

[hcschuetz]

Ok, I was able to configure a variant of Google search with query parameter "udm=14" after setting the Firefox config parameter browser.urlbar.update2.engineAliasRefresh = true.  But now I'm apparently using an undocumented Firefox feature.