USING GOOGLE WITH THE EDGE BROWSER
by Phil Ball

Q. I've begun using Edge, the new browser in Windows 10. It seems to work fine except that I can't get used to having only Bing as a search engine. I've used Google for years and I'd like to continue to use it. When I tried to change my default search engine, my only choice is Bing. I know Google works in Edge because if I type Google.com onto the address bar, I can use it but I don't find any way to change it. Am I doomed to using Bing with Edge or is there a way to make Google my default?

A. You can switch to Google but there is a trick to making it your default. Open Edge and navigate to Google's web page: www.google.com. After it appears, click on the three dots in a row at the top right of Edge because clicking this new symbol gets you to various actions. After you click the dots, at the bottom of the resulting menu, click Settings. Scroll down the list to near the bottom and click a button labeled: View advanced settings. Near the bottom of this menu is an item called: Search in the address bar with and there is a drop-down arrow in the space below it that currently shows only Bing. Only if the Google web page is open, it will give you the choice of choosing Google. Highlight Google and then you can click Add as default. Click anywhere outside this menu and you have now changed your default search engine.

Oddly enough, when I Googled your question to make sure I didn't leave any steps out, I noticed that there was no entry from Microsoft telling how to do this. Since Bing is a Microsoft product, I think they were confident that you would want to use it rather than any other search engine so they didn't offer instructions about how to switch search engines. I also noticed that there were some wrong answers from other websites that must have been true for pre-production versions of Edge but didn't work with the current version.

Published: Courier 9/12/15 - Page 5A