Changing Opera’s Default Search Engine
I don’t know if the decision to use Ask.com as the default search engine in Opera is because of Google Chrome or if the developers just find it better, but I prefer Google myself.
If you’d like to switch Opera’s search bar and speed dial default search engine just head into Preferences and choose Search. Here you mark the search engine you’d like to use as default (Google in my case) and hit Edit. Click Details and make sure to check Use as default search engine and Use as speed dial search engine. Voilá, you’re done.
Now, while you’re at it you could add other search engines you use a lot here – it’s quite a time saver. For example, I’ve added Google Images with the keyword “gi”, iStockPhoto as “istock” and IMDb as “imdb” so whenever I need to find royalty free images of bananas (happens all the time) I just type “istock bananas” in Opera’s address field and I’m off to the result pages at iStockPhoto.com.
Here’s the addresses I’ve used for custom search engines:
Google Images:
http://images.google.com/images?hl=en&q=%s
iStockPhoto:
http://www.istockphoto.com/file_search.php?text=%s&action=file
IMDb:
http://www.imdb.com/find?s=all&q=%s
PHP.net:
http://se.php.net/manual-lookup.php?pattern=%s&lang=en