Use google.com as default search engine in Chrome

Google Chrome became my favorite browser after launch, not necessarily because of the Google brand, but by association with WebKit and Safari. Also the features and speed aren’t all that bad. I like it so much that I didn’t install any other browser on my new computer (yet).

One small thing I don’t like about Chrome though is how Google redirects searches to the localized version of the website, even though the results are pretty much the same everywhere. That’s not exactly a browser annoyance, but a Google one, but I still want to get it fixed. I prefer the international, .com, version because it usually gets all the new features first. And I would very much like to see the stars.

At first, it seemed the choice is simply unavailable. If you visit the ‘Search Engines’ configuration window (right-click in the omnibox and choose “Edit search engines…”) and try to edit the built-in Google search, you can only change the name and keyword, while the URL box is grayed out. Actually it’s the same for the other built-in options like Yahoo! and Bing as well.

So I created a new search engine instead and replaced the default parameter {google:baseURL} with http://www.google.com/ to generate the following URL:

http://www.google.com/search?{google:RLZ}{google:acceptedSuggestion}{google:originalQueryForSuggestion}sourceid=chrome&ie={inputEncoding}&q=%s

Just make this new search engine the default and in the future the omnibox will direct your queries to google.com. You can always use the original, country-specific search by typing it’s keyword in the omnibox.