How-to get English results from Firefox Google search

Ubuntu 8.10 / Firefox 3.0.X

I used to use Google for searching on the Internet. Once I started to use Firefox I found Google Search plugin very handful, but because I am working in big company our connection to Internet goes through proxies and so on, so in despite I do not understand German either live there, any attempt to use Google Search engine in Firefox ends with the list of German links. So I looked around for solution and because you may face the same problem, I would share with you possible solution :

Open /usr/lib/firefox-addons/searchplugins/google.xml

<Url type="text/html" method="GET" template="http://www.google.com/search">
  <Param name="q" value="{searchTerms}"/>
  <Param name="ie" value="utf-8"/>
  <Param name="oe" value="utf-8"/>
  <Param name="aq" value="t"/>
  <Param name="rls" value="{moz:distributionID}:{moz:locale}:{moz:official}"/>
  <MozParam name="client" condition="defaultEngine" trueValue="firefox-a" falseValue="firefox"/>
</Url>

Add these parameters:

• <Param name="hl" value="en"/>... this displays interface in English (hl = language of the interface)
• <Param name="lr" value="lang_en"/>...this returns English results (lr= language of results)

Don't forget to backup your google.xml, I found this file modified after some updates of Firefox.

Posted at 03:32PM Feb 17, 2009 by marian in how-to  |  Comments[0]