Someone Yahooed my Google

Somebody tinkered with my office PC (a junky piece of obsolete machinery, which can’t run on anything beyond Windows 98 and has transformed me into a patient being) and installed a piece of software I for reasons unknown detest – Yahoo Messenger. Especially in an office environment, it is a pain. In my previous workplace, I was tired of asking my colleagues to stop chatting on their Yahoo Messengers and to get back to the job that gets them their weekend booze. The IT department suggested censorship, I vetoed – censorship seems so dictatorial. Much later when official purposes demanded regular instant messenger use, I suggested Google Talk (yes, it still has some problems, but is by far the most unobtrusive), but the gyaanis went the Yahoo way.

But the problem this time wasn’t about gossiping colleagues or official policies, but the crap that installs itself along with the Yahoo Messenger into your system. I instinctively deleted all those beginning with the word Yahoo that I could find in the Add/Remove Programs list. But something remained. The default Firefox location bar search engine changed to Yahoo instead of the old favourite Google ‘I’m lucky.’ How irritating. Previously I just had to type in a name and the website would open pronto, now I was directed to a Yahoo search results page. Yahoo might be working on its search engine, but Google is by far the best. There wasn’t anything in the menu bar that would solve my problem. Fortunately, I wasn’t the only one pestered by these popularisation gimmicks. Help was on hand using what else but Google.

This is what I did:

1. Type about:config in Firefox location bar and press enter
2. Type keyword in filter textbox and you will see only the preference keyword.URL.
3. Double-click on keyword.URL and change the value to: http://www.google.com/search?btnI=I%27m+Feeling+Lucky&q=

And finally things were back to normal. Thanks to Angsuman Chakraborty for the gyaan.