I recently re-installed my Windows installation. Most of my Opera profiled remained intact as I took a backup. One thing however which was reset was my configurations for search engines.

The developers behind Opera has decided that the user may add custom search engines, but may not assign them as the default search engine. There is also no user-friendly way to remove any of the default search engines.

Below I will show how to add a new custom search engine and how to remove the default search engines¹.

Add a new search engine

Say I like YouTube a lot and wish to use YouTube as a custom search engine, for this I would do the following:

1. Open Opera Settings [Alt + P]
2. Navigate to the Browser section and then select: Manage search engines...

   

3. Next step is to press the Add new search button

4. The I fill in:

   • Name: YouTube
   • Keyword: y

   • Address:

     https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=%s
     

     

As can bee seen in the picture above I get the error Keyword must be unique. The reason behind this is that Yahoo! already occupies this keyword.

Remove default search engines²

To rectify this, we need to remove all default search engines I do not use. I only use Google, so the following can be removed:

• Yahoo!
• DuckDuckGo
• Amazon
• Bing
• Wikipedia

To remove them I need to do the following.

1. Open about opera to find you installation path

   opera://about
   

   

2. My installation path is:

   C:\Program Files (x86)\Opera
   

3. Close Opera

4. Open the installation folder in explorer

5. Navigate to [Version Number]\resources

6. Locate the file default_partner_content.json

7. Make a backup copy of this file.

8. Open the file in a text editor³.

9. The contents of the file will look something like this:

   {
   "version":33,
   "search_engines": {
   "location": {
     "at": {
       "other": {
         "list": [
           "google_at",
           "yahoo",
           "duckduckgo",
           "amazon",
           "bing",
           "wiki_de"
         ],
         "speed_dial_index_list": [0]
       }
     },

10. Look up your location, for me it was gb

11. Remove all lines referencing the engines you want to remove. I only want Google to remain, my part of gb the looks like this:

            "wiki_fr"
          ],
          "speed_dial_index_list": [0]
        }
      },
      "gb": {
        "other": {
          "list": [
            "google_uk",
          ],
          "speed_dial_index_list": [0]
        }
      },
      "gr": {
        "other": {
          "list": [
            "google_gr",

12. Save file

13. Start Opera

    

Links

Opera Web Browser