The most annoying thing in the world has been happening lately, and when it’s happening to me I typically figure other people are having problems with it as well. So I decided to post the fix here. That is, when I type some keywords in the address bar with Firefox (using ver. 4), lately it will always take me to an Ask.com search results page. And I hate Ask.com!

I think this happened as a result of downloading something, because I noticed a toolbar and my homepage changed. Changing the homepage back was easy (click on the orange Firefox, then Options, Options, and under the General tab beside homepage click restore to default). But I could not figure out how to get rid of the pesky Ask.com search whenever keywords were typed into the address bar.

Yes! I know there’s a search bar right beside it, and all I have to do is hit Tab one more time!

But sometimes these things happen.

Anyhow, I did a GOOGLE search for the solution, and after digging through the support forums I wanted to make the answer easy for you. So here it is:

I have had exactly this problem, I think after installing some free FLI to MP4 transcoder software. It seems that it enables Firefox’s ‘keyword’ functionality (if it isn’t already enabled) and then hijacks the default setting (which does a Google search.)

To fix, put ‘about:config’ in the address bar to enter Firefox’s configuration page (I don’t think you can get at this from any of the menus.) Look out for The ‘keyword.URL’ setting, and change it back to one of the recommendations shown on this page http://kb.mozillazine.org/Keyword.URL

The first one worked for me. I now get a Google result instead of an Ask one if the webpage fails to load. If you don’t want this functionality at all, then look for the ‘keyword.enabled’ setting and set it to ‘false.’

By the way, the keyword setting I used was “http://www.google.com/search?ie=UTF-8&oe=utf-8&q=” which set it back to Google. Also, you’ll need to do this to get rid of some more Ask.com settings (good gravy!):

There are more than just the keyword.URL configuration keys that should be modified. in the about:config console, type “ask” to filter out the keys that have been modified by the ask.com toolbar. Also, easiest is just to right-click on the key and choose reset.

And that’s that!