Microsoft’s Edge browser is now based on the Chromium code and you can try the Dev and Canary version without waiting for the final release version which might take many months. We have already detailed steps to download the Beta, Canary or Dev version of the new Chromium based Edge browser in Windows 10 or Mac computer previously – how to install new Edge browser in Windows 10.
But the Edge browser comes only with two search engines – Bing and DuckDuckGo. What if you want to use Google or Yahoo? There are two ways to add new search engines in the new Microsoft Edge browser:
Method 1: Quick import from Chrome browser
- Close all the windows of both the Chrome and Edge browsers.
- Press Win+R, type %LocalAppData%\Google\Chrome\User Data\Default and press Enter. This will open Chrome’s user data folder.
- Press Win+R, type %LocalAppData%\Microsoft\Edge Dev\User Data\Default and press Enter. This will open the user profile folder for Microsoft Edge browser. In the path, you may have to change Edge Dev to Edge Canary or Edge Beta depending on the version of Edge you have installed.
- Find a file named Web Data in the first folder (opened in step 1) and copy it to second folder( opened in the step 2).
- Now launch Edge browser, type in edge://settings/searchEngines and you will see a big list of newly added search engines.
Method 2: Manually add search engines
- In the Edge browser type in edge://settings/searchEngines and press Enter.
- Click on the Add button.
- In the small window that opens, you have to type in the name of the search engine, keyword and URL for search query. For example, in the case of Wikipedia the query URL is https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%s.
- Finally click on the Add button to add the new search engine.
- If you want to set a search engine as the default, then click on the menu for that search engine (three dots next to it) and select Make Default.
Perhaps Microsoft will add more search engines in the final release version of the Edge browser. But as of now, method 1 mentioned above is the fastest way to add all the popular search engines in new Edge browser.
Useful information, thanks. I have a suggestion though. When adding Wikipedia as an additional search engine you entered “Wikipedia.org” in the ‘Keyword’ field. That means (if Wikipedia is not your default search engine) in order to search using Wikipedia you would have to type “Wikipedia.org” in the address bar and then hit the space bar and then type your search. If you instead use the ‘Keyword’ “w” for the Wikipedia search engine, you can just type “w photon” in order to search Wikipedia for “photon”. Saves some time.