Dolphin for Android: How to Change the Default Search Engine

Modern browsers typically use the URL bar for both web addresses and search terms – anything that isn’t a URL is treated as a search term. The browser then forwards the search term to a search engine. This process is designed to be a quality of life feature that saves you having to browse to a search engine to then enter your search query.

Treating the URL bar as a search bar, however, requires the browser to choose a search engine to send your query to. Browsers typically set a default search engine and let those users that prefer other search engines select them from a list.

The Dolphin browser on Android defaults to using Google, but if you prefer to use a different search engine, a few other options are available.

To change the default search engine, you need to go into Dolphin’s in-app settings. To be able to access the settings, you first need to tap the Dolphin icon in the center of the bottom bar.

Tap the Dolphin icon in the centre of the bottom bar to be able to access the in-app settings.

Next, tap the cogwheel icon in the bottom-right of the popup pane to open the settings.

Tap the cogwheel icon in the bottom-right of the popup pane to open the in-app settings.

In the settings list, tap “Search engine” to manage the default search engine.

Tap “Search engine”, the fourth option in the “Basic” sub-section, to configure which search engine is used as default.

To select a search engine simply tap the one you want to use. There are five search engines that you can choose between. Google is the default search engine. Bing and Yahoo are competing search engines respectively offered by Microsoft and Yahoo. DuckDuckGo is a search engine that collates results from a range of other search engines and doesn’t filter any of the results based on perceived interests in an attempt to avoid a filter bubble. Yandex is a Russian search engine.

Tip: A filter bubble is a self-reinforcing concept where websites such as search engines filter results. They do this based on perceived interests in an attempt to show you content that you’re more likely to be interested in. This issue with this approach is that the system reinforces its own perception of your interests while making it harder for you to see resources that could conflict with your opinions. In the worst-case scenarios, this results in situations where people that like conspiracy theories only see conspiracy theory results rather than any fact checking results.

You can also choose to enable or disable search suggestions when typing in the URL bar by tapping the “Show search suggestions” slider.