Cortana allows you to search for items in Windows 10 such as settings, files, and apps on your PC and it uses the default Bing search engine. Please visit this article on how to disable Cortona via group policy and via the Windows registry.
By default as you can see below, Cortana wants to serve each of your searches using Microsoft’s own search engine Bing and now “Edge”. You may not like this, but Bing has come a long way, but it’s still not as competitive as chrome is.
Cortana search with a different web browser
To have these steps implemented, you will have to download Chrome and you do not necessarily have to make it your default browser.
You can download Chrome from here. Simply download and run the setup file.
Now we will have to ensure Cortana uses Chrome as its default search engine. Here’s are the steps to redirect Cortana Search from Bing to Google Chrome.
Note: Currently there is no built-in method to get Cortana to switch to Google Chrome instead the following methods below can be used.
You can redirect Bing searches to use Google instead with an extension called Chrometana for Chrome as shown below.
– Be careful of the extension you just download, this might never work, instead, search on the Chrome web store.
– Click on add to chrome
Finally, click on Add Extension as shown below
After it’s installed, the following page below will appear and Google will be selected by default as shown below
If you currently have Edge installed on your device, these steps above may not work correctly as Microsoft is indirectly forcing everyone to use edge. You can remove Microsoft Edge as described here.
Note: If this does not work for your after removing Edge, ensure to have it reinstalled and follow the steps here “How to make Cortana Use Your Default Browser Google Chrome“.
Note: You can also disable the taskbar search. See the following article for the steps and also how to disable Taskbar Web Search in Windows 10 via GPO.
For Firefox implementation, this is a little bit straight forward.
– Ensure sure you using the latest version of Firefox installed and you have set Firefox as your default browser.
Then set your default search engine by going to using the following steps
- Navigate to "Options"
- Then "Search" and you have other options in Firefox as well such as Twitter, Amazon, Wikipedia, etc to choose from.I hope you found this blog post helpful. If you have any questions, please let me know in the comment session.