Up in the top-right corner of Firefox is a search box that puts potentially thousands of search engines within easy reach. A few search engines come pre-installed with Firefox, but you may want to add more.

Adding Search Engines

To find more search engines, visit mycroft.mozdev.org/download.html. There you can navigate through the database to find the search engine you want to add.

Click the link for the search engine you want.

There may be a few options or variations of the search engine, so choose one. Usually you want the first one on the list, which is the general search, but you may also want to add image searches, and others.

There will be a confirmation window. Just click OK.

Now that search engine will be available from the dropdown inside the search box. Just select the search engine, type your query and you're set. You can add as many search engines as you want.

Removing Search Engines

Removing search engines is a little bit harder than adding them. Remember that firefox is still a young application, so not everything is easy yet.

Removing search engines from the search box requires you to manually delete some files. Each search engine has two files; a .src and either a .png or a .gif file. All you have to do is delete the two files for the search engine you wish to remove (for example google.src and google.gif).

These files are located in your Firefox installation directory, under the folder searchplugins. This directory is usually:

C:\Program Files\Mozilla Firefox\searchplugins - For Windows
- o r-
/usr/lib/firefox-1.0.4/searchplugins - For Linux (replace the version number with your version).

Once you have deleted the files, you must restart Firefox for the changes to take effect.

I'm sure in further releases Mozilla will take the time to add an option in the browser to remove search engines.