Adding a custom search engine in Mozilla Thunderbird is tricky and prone to compatibility errors. Follow the procedure below to access your favorite search engine from the email client.

Find Your Default Search Engine

First, you need to find your default search engine for the Thunderbird client. For this, select any email text and look for the available default search option. I was running an older version 60 with Bing as the default search option.

Before adding Google search in Thunderbird’s default setting, it is important for you to upgrade your Thunderbird to the latest version, which is 68.1 at the time of this writing.

First, close your Thunderbird application and go to Mozilla’s official website to download the latest Thunderbird client.

The migration to a higher version will not take very long if you were already using an existing email with the Thunderbird client. You don’t have to uninstall the previous version, as it will automatically sync with the latest update. Wait for all your emails to show up on the dashboard.

Once done, go to the three-bar menu and click “Options” twice. After that, go to “General.”

Here, you can locate the latest search engines. To change over to Google, simply select it as shown here.

Next time you search a new text, it will display Google as a default search option.

Add DuckDuckGo

Similar to the above procedure, you need to select DuckDuckGo as your default search engine.

As soon as you select any text, it will enable DuckDuckGo for search results with a specific term.

Adding Custom Search Engines

Thunderbird also allows you to add your own search engines, provided that you have the XML file.

If you are able to download the XML file for any other search engine compatible with Thunderbird, you can click the “Add from file” button and add the custom search engine XML file to the list. For example, for StartPage, you can download its XML file from this link (right-click and select “Save link”).

Alternatively, you can create your own custom search engine XML file. It is very easy to do so.

  1. Open a notepad and paste the following text:

  2. Change the following:

  • Custom Search Engine Name – Change this to the your custom search engine name.
  • Custom Search Engine Description – Add a description for this custom search engine.
  • https://search-engine-url – Change this to the custom search engine URL.