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browser - Firefox modifying google searchplugin to not country redirect


I'm trying to modify the google.xml file in the browser/searchplugins folder in a way that it won't country redirect anymore. For example, to always reach the german google site, I have changed the last lines of the google.xml to this:



  
......



At first, after restarting firefox, it didn't seem to have changed anything, however the next day when I started firefox, the changes seemed to have taken effect, because when I tried to google something, an Error Message was displayed aka "Uknown URL /ncr/search".


I now would like to know, how I can FORCE FF to reload the plugin immediately so I don't have to wait one day to test each change I made. Also it would be nice to know of course, how I need to modify the google.xml correctly.



Answer



Doing more research, I found out that FF can be forced to reload modified searchplugins by deleting the search.js in %AppData%\\Mozilla\\Firefox\\Profiles\\[ID].default\\ or the linux equivalent folder.


To actually get google to not redirect anymore, the following changes need to be made to the google.xml in the ....\\Mozilla Firefox\\browser\\searchplugins\\ folder:


in Line 13 change google.com/search to google.de/search or the TLD of your country. It should now be




in Line 27 change google.com to google.de/ncr. It should now be




save it (Admin rights may be required). Delete the search.js mentioned earlier and restart firefox.


This got me working results for FF 32.0.3


UPDATE: In the FF35.0 Update, the syntax of the google.xml file seems to have changed. It's sufficient to change line 13 as mentioned above. Line 27 has been removed. Don't forget to delete the search.js


UPDATE 2: Since FF40.0, the default search plugin xmls are not available as plain text anymore. The new recommended way is to install the google US (no country redirect) search plugin from Mycroft (see answer below) and and modify the xml in FF's AppData Folder to one's needs.


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