How to change the default search engine on Windows

Two answers, because Windows runs two systems

For Microsoft Edge: paste edge://settings/search into the address bar, press Enter, and change Search engine used in the address bar. For the search box on the taskbar and in the Start menu, there is no equivalent — Windows Search sends its web results to Bing, and Windows offers no supported setting that points it at another engine.

Written in August 2026 against Windows 11 and the current release channel of Edge. The Edge path has been stable across recent versions, but the settings page is long enough that the menu route is worth having:

1. Open Edge and click Settings and more — the … button at the top right — then Settings.
2. In the left sidebar, click Privacy, search, and services.
3. Scroll to the bottom, to the Services group, and click Address bar and search.
4. Open the Search engine used in the address bar dropdown and choose an engine.
5. If the engine you want is absent, click Manage search engines, then Add, and supply a name, a shortcut and a URL containing %s where the query belongs.

The change takes effect on the next thing you type. Nothing restarts, no tabs close, and your history, favourites and saved passwords are unaffected.

Edge's new-tab page has its own idea

Having changed the dropdown, many people type into the large search box on Edge's new-tab page, get Bing, and conclude the setting failed. It did not. That box is part of the new-tab page rather than part of the address bar, and it is governed by a separate control on the very same settings screen: Search on new tabs uses search box or address bar. Set it to Address bar and the new-tab box starts obeying your chosen engine; leave it on the search-box option and it keeps using Microsoft's.

This is not an oversight. The new-tab page is an advertising and content surface for Microsoft, and its search box is one of the last places on a Windows machine that reliably still produces Bing queries after a user has switched. Knowing that it is a second switch, in the same place, is most of the fix.

Windows Search is a different product

The box on the taskbar, and the one that appears when you press the Windows key and start typing, are Windows Search. Its job is to find applications, settings, files and mail on the machine; the web results it mixes in come from Bing, and clicking one opens Edge. Neither half of that follows Edge's address-bar setting, because Windows Search is not a browser and does not read browser preferences.

There is no supported control that swaps Bing for another engine here. What Windows does offer is the ability to stop the web results appearing at all, so that the box returns to being a local search:

• In Settings → Privacy & security → Search permissions, turn off Show search highlights, and review the cloud content search options above it.
• On Windows editions that include the Group Policy Editor, Computer Configuration → Administrative Templates → Windows Components → Search contains the policy Don't search the web or display web results in Search. Enabling it removes web results entirely.

Third-party utilities exist that intercept these searches and reroute them to another engine. They work by hooking a protocol Windows uses internally, they have been broken deliberately by Windows updates before, and they carry the ordinary risks of software that inserts itself between the shell and the browser. That trade-off is the reader's to make, but it should be made knowingly rather than by installing something described as a simple search changer.

In the European Economic Area the position is different: Microsoft has stated that Windows Search web results there open in the user's default browser rather than forcing Edge, and that third-party providers can be plugged into Windows Search — obligations arising from the Digital Markets Act rather than from any Windows setting a user turns on.

Chrome and Firefox on the same machine

Each installed browser stores its own engine, so a Windows PC commonly has three different answers running at once. In Chrome the control is under Settings → Search engine. In Firefox it is ☰ → Settings → Search, where Default Search Engine sits at the top; Firefox additionally lets you nominate a different engine for private windows, and lets you add engines from sites that publish them.

Which of them opens a link clicked in Outlook, Teams or a PDF is yet another setting, held by Windows rather than by any browser: Settings → Apps → Default apps, then select the browser and use the Set default button at the top of its page. Setting a default browser changes nothing about search engines; it changes which application the link is handed to, and that application then applies its own engine.

When the change does not survive a restart

Windows carries the largest genuine hijacking problem of any platform here, so it is worth separating the ordinary causes from the malicious ones.

Ordinary first. If the dropdown is greyed out and the browser says it is managed, a policy is in force — legitimately on a work machine, illegitimately if malware wrote the policy on a personal one. If an extension declared itself a search provider, the browser will say so and the fix is to remove the extension rather than to fight the dropdown. And if you changed Edge but keep typing into the new-tab box or the taskbar, nothing was ever wrong.

The Windows-specific one is the shortcut. A long-standing trick modifies the desktop or taskbar shortcut so that the browser is launched with a URL appended to its command line, which means the browser opens on a search page every time regardless of any setting inside it. Right-click the shortcut, choose Properties, and read the Target field: it should end at the executable name, with nothing after it. Anything else — a URL, a string of flags — is the cause, and correcting the Target field or deleting and recreating the shortcut ends it. Check every shortcut you actually use, including the pinned taskbar ones, because they are separate files.

Beyond that, look at scheduled tasks that relaunch a browser with arguments, and at unfamiliar entries in Settings → Apps → Installed apps dated to the day the behaviour started. A search page you never chose, that reappears after removal, is malware rather than a preference, and resetting the browser's settings without removing the software that writes them only buys a few minutes.

What is actually on offer

Edge's dropdown and Chrome's list are short, and they contain fewer independent indexes than they contain names. Bing crawls and ranks its own; Google does; Yandex does in its own market. DuckDuckGo — the most common destination for Windows users leaving Bing — builds on Bing's results with its own privacy handling on top, which means a Windows user who switches to it changes who logs the query rather than which crawler found the pages.

Both Edge and Chrome accept a manually added engine, and that matters more on Windows than the preset list does, because it is the route to independently crawled options such as Mojeek and Brave Search, to subscription engines that carry no advertising, and to a self-hosted instance. The one thing no setting on Windows will do is take Bing out of the taskbar.

Frequently asked questions

Sources

• support.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-edge
• learn.microsoft.com/en-us/deployedge/microsoft-edge-policies
• support.microsoft.com/en-us/windows
• support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/change-your-default-search-settings-firefox