There’s no reason not to leave it alone… though choosing a better default is advisable.

There are many times when SearX isn’t a good solution (though SearX or SearXNG are a great default)… Your answer is ‘popular’ because everyone hates Google. But also problematic, because it will lead to folks trying something else and then just going back to the best one.

You’re defeating your own aims.

• SearX sucks for many kinds of searches…
• SearXNG too

Though you can punch through with DDG style bangs…

• !!b for Bing

For this search, Duckduckgo is probably nicer. Adding - and not removing stuff from Firefox gives you the simple choice to use keywords:

• ddg for duckduckgo
• gg for Google
• brave

Now see what happens if we try to get an ‘ebook’ copy of ‘The Hobbit’:

• ebook the hobbit a direct download link. Nice (because I added annas-archive with the keyword ‘ebook’).

So really, the trick is more to

1. Break Google’s stronghold on your internet. Right now the internet is virtually owned by Google, Reddit, Meta.
2. Find out why Google Search now has trouble giving you good results the way I remember it did ten years or more in the past.
3. Be more flexible.
4. Don’t forget that it’s also very easy to add ‘lml’ for ‘Lemmy.ml’ search (though it’s currently down, so I’ll try Lemmy.World instead: lw firefox