Change web search engine for Spotlight

Question

Search the web from Spotlight (⌘ CommandSpace) by entering search text and pressing ⌘ CommandB. The expected result of opening the default web browser (Firefox) and completing the web search occurs. However, the web search engine uses Google rather than the default (DuckDuckGo).

How can I set it so the search is done with my chosen search provider?

macOS 10.15.7

Answer 1

Those who have a more recent macOS such as Big Sur (11.x) can solve this problem by simply changing the default search engine for Safari. Big Sur uses Safari's default search engine to get the results in the default browser (in this case Firefox), if the web search is launched via Spotlight.

Imagine Ecosia as the default search engine in Safari and DuckDuckGo in Firefox. When you're using Spotlight, it uses Ecosia (the default search engine in Safari) to produce a search URL and opens it in the default browser (Firefox).

Answer 2

You can't change this.

It used to be Bing was the default search for Spotlight, but doing some research I found that of recent, Google has been paying Apple a significant sum of money to be the default search engine.

• Apple Doesn’t Truly Let You Change Search Engines

• Apple switches from Bing to Google for Siri web search results on iOS and Spotlight on Mac

While using Spotlight for web searching is a nice feature, until the ability to change the engine becomes a reality, the only workaround is to search from your browser.

Answer 3

As a workaround you can solve this issue at the browser-level using custom Chrome/Firefox/Safari extension that redirects user from https://www.google.com/search?q=... website to https://duckduckgo.com/?q=....

I've some experience building a similar extension that redirect users from Google to Yandex Search when search query contains letters in Russian (not English) to improve search results quality. The source code can be found here: https://github.com/nezort11/google-yandex-cyrillic-redirect. It works almost instantaneous.

Approximate code to redirect from Google to DuckDuckGo for Firefox:

browser.webRequest.onBeforeRequest.addListener(
  redirectSearch,
  // Request filter
  {
    urls: ["https://www.google.com/search*"],
  },
  // Modify the request
  ["blocking"]
);

function redirectSearch(requestDetails) {
  const url = new URL(requestDetails.url);
  const query = url.searchParams.get("q");

  if (query) {
    return {
      redirectUrl: `https://duckduckgo.com/?q=${query}`,
    };
  }
}

Answer 4

This issue has been resolved on macOS 11!