If you’ve installed Chromium on your Linux distro you might have found it counter-intuitive to set Google as a default search engine. Here’s how you do it, quick & easy.

Because I have found a lot of ill-descriptive, horribly written and of course not illustrated »solutions« like this one on that »Oh this is such a no-brainer« question… (if it is, a lot of people don’t have a brain it seems, judging from search volume), I’ve decided to answer this first world problem once and for all! Here we go.

Open Chromium search settings

You have to open the »search engine and site search« settings, which you can either do through the chrome URL chrome://settings/searchEngines or by right-clicking into the search bar and selecting »Manage search engines and site search«.

When you have entered those settings, the »mistake« is to intuitively assume that you can select google from some list and make it a default search engine, but that is not how it works in Chromium. Instead, you first have to create a custom site search query, like follows:

Create a custom site search first

Google’s search query URL is https://www.google.com/search?q= and you need to enter that into Chromium as a custom site search entry:

For occasional use of Google

If you want to use Google from the address bar just as an alternative and not the default search engine, you can now type @google (or whatever you entered as a command above) and access the search engine that way:

However, if like most people, you prefer to just have google as your default search engine, you need to make it the default search engine, which is also done in the search settings:

Make Google the default search engine in Chromium

In the site serach list that now contains Google search as well within the Chromium settings, you need to click on the 3 little dots on the right side of the row that contains your google search and click »Make default«.

After doing that you’ll notice that the Google search option now migrated up into the »Search engines« list, where you now can make it the actual default search engine by again clicking those 3 little dots right next to it.

It should look like this now:

And you’re done. Happy Googling!