Firefox tries to get you where you are going even if you don’t give it a URL. I’m going to take you through changing how/if it does such a thing, and how to fix it if it brakes.
By default if you put “apple” into Firefox’s address bar, it will send you to Apple’s website. In fact, if you put “Apple iPad” in it will send you to the iPad product page. To achieve this bit of magic Firefox talks to Google and has one of the following conversations.
FF: “My user told me to go to ‘Apple iPad’. Where’s that?”
Goggle: “‘http://apple.com/iPad’ has an overwhelming rating for those keywords, Let me send them there”
And so Google (not Firefox) forwards you there with out you ever knowing.
- OR -
FF: “My user told me to go to ‘purple perfume’. Where’s that?”
Google: “I dunno! But i found a bunch of images of ‘purple perfume’, I’ll show them what i found.”
Google shows you search result treating your non-url as a query.
This is similar to the “i feel lucky” feature, but is specifically built for this purpose in browsers. It weighs how confident Google is in its top hit before it sends you there. If its not confident, or doesn’t think you’re talking about an specific page or end location, it will show you search results.
Some may want to turn this feature off, change it to another search engine like Bing. I figured out how to fix it after a Yahoo plug in decided it could do a better job, which after 5 minutes drove me totally insane.
Type about:config into your address bar
The “about:config” file is your browsers raw preferences, and if you play with the wrong feature you could mess things up. So just stick to the plan here, ok? You may get a warning to this effect, so click OK to proceed.
Do a search for “keyword.URL“
Firefox is nice and organizes your Config stuff into a searchable table. Use the search bar at the top of the page, not your Google search bar. You should find 2 key/value pairs. You want the one called “keyword.URL”.
Double click “keyword.URL” and enter one of the following (without quotes):
http://www.google.com/search?ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8&sourceid=navclient&gfns=1&q=“http://www.google.com/search?q=“http://www.bing.com/search?q=“If you want to disable this feature all together find “Keyword.enabled” and change it to “False”
Click “OK” and close the window
Test it out by putting in something that’s not a url. If you disabled this feature you should just a get a “page not found” error.
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