Tuesday, March 12, 2013

How to remove Linux Mint modified Google search from Chromium

As we know all browsers installed on Linux Mint come patched to use Linux Mint modified Google search if you search directly from the address bar. I prefer the original Google search interface to the Mint's customization of the page (Mint's variant won't show the current time, short info from Wikipedia on the right side, etc; after all I just dislike how the customized search results page looks).

If you use Chromium's / Chrome's synchronization option, then you have the Linux Mint Google search page across your machines on which you used Chromium / Chrome and signed in to the synchronization service. This is quite annoying (you would actually see the Linux Mint search on a Windows machine as well) if you don't like how the search results are presented on the customized page or if you don't use / like Mint.

So here is how to make Chromium use the default Google search for searches from the address bar:

Sign in to your Google account (if not already signed in) - open Chromium / Chrome settings - go to the Settings tab - section Search - Manage search engines (or just type chrome://settings/searchEngines in the Chromium's address bar to go directly to the step we need) - locate the string www.google.com/cse**** - remove it. Linux Mint's search results page is now gone.




Set the search engine you want.

This is the default Google search for me - {google:baseURL}search?q=%s&{google:RLZ}{google:acceptedSuggestion}{google:originalQueryForSuggestion}{google:assistedQueryStats}{google:searchFieldtrialParameter}{google:searchClient}{google:sourceId}{google:instantExtendedEnabledParameter}ie={inputEncoding}