If you’re using Safari on your iPhone or iPad, there’s a good chance that you’ve set the default search engine to Google. This is a bad decision because it can slow down your browsing experience and make it difficult to find what you’re looking for. To change the default search engine in Safari on your iPhone or iPad, open Safari and select Preferences. In the General preferences pane, select the Security tab and then check the box next to “Use Google search.” If you don’t want to use Google search, then select another option in the preferences pane. Now that Safari has changed its default search engine, you’ll need to visit a website or app and enter in your desired address bar query to see what results are returned. For example, if you want to see all of Apple’s products, type “apple” into the address bar and press return. If you only want results for a certain website or app, type that information into the address bar again and press return again. You can also use keyboard shortcuts (such as Command-F5) to enter specific search terms.
Safari uses Google as its default search engine out of the box, but it’s not the only option. You can choose other search engines like Bing, Yahoo, or DuckDuckGo if you prefer them.
While most modern search engines can find the websites you’re looking for, there are often ramifications to consider when making your selection. Google is the big player here, but you might want to select something else depending on your privacy stance. For example, DuckDuckGo pushes itself as a more private search engine, while Bing is integrated with Microsoft Rewards. Making the change in Safari on your iPhone or iPad is super simple, so long as you know where to look.
Changing the Default Search Engine in Safari on iPhone and iPad
To get started, open the Settings app and tap “Safari.”
Next, under the “Search” heading, tap “Search Engine.”
Finally, select the search engine that you would like to use as your default when inside Safari. To select a search engine, tap it. You can choose either Google, Yahoo, Bing, Ecosia, or DuckDuckGo.
Sorry—those are the only options. Apple won’t let you choose other search engines as your default. You can still navigate to those search engines in Safari and search them from their website, but that’s it. The only way you’ll get more options here is if Apple adds them in a future version of the iOS operating system.
There is, however, a caveat to consider here. This setting will only change the default search engine that is used when searching from within Safari. If you use Siri or Spotlight to search, they’ll still use Google. It’s not ideal, but Google pays a considerable amount of money to Apple every year to make this the situation we have to live with, unfortunately.
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