—Superseded by a newer OpenDNS article, written to bring everything up to date. —

It’s a common question, and most people don’t really look for the answer. If you make the switch to using OpenDNS, all of a sudden the feature of typing anything into your address bar in firefox, and being redirected to the best-match page from google doesn’t work. And it’s surprising how used to that feature you get. I, for instance, just type “gmail” into the address bar and Firefox/Google gets me to where I want to go. Some people I know of have actually got rid of OpenDNS for this reason alone. Well all is not lost! Don’t change your settings just yet - you can make a simple tweak in Firefox to make it all better.

First things first, go to the address bar of Firefox and type about:config and hit return. You may be given a warning message, simply click “I’ll be careful, I promise!”. What appears is a list of the configurable variables that Firefox uses. Beware, messing with the wrong ones can break your browser. We’re interested in only one of them. In the filter box, type keyword. Double click the keyword.URL entry in the list and change the contents of the box that appears to http://www.google.com/search?btnI=I%27m+Feeling+Lucky&q= click OK and you’re done. And for those of us in the UK, just substitute the google.com with a google.co.uk.

Anything you now type into the address bar of Firefox, if it’s not a valid website address, will be redirected to Google’s “I’m Feeling Lucky” search. I’m Feeling Lucky, for the uninitiated, is a button next to Search on the Google homepage that you can use if you’re sure the first entry that’s going to be returned by Google’s normal search will be what you’re looking for. Firefox will now act exactly the same way when you type your search term into the address bar - bypassing that horrible OpenDNS search page.