Set Mobile Safari’s Default Search Engine To Wolfram Alpha, Baidu, Yandex & Others
A few months back, we covered a rather complicated method for adding more options to the list of default search engines in Safari for iOS. While that method (involving iFile and file system editing) still works perfectly, the margin for error in it is very little. One wrong entry in the registry, and you might end up rendering your iPhone’s Safari completely unusable (I landed my iPhone in that condition doing that, so that’s personal experience right there). So, it was about time some clever developer came up with a one-touch solution for this issue. SearchEnable is a new tweak that automatically adds 8 new search engines to Safari’s stock list, which natively includes only Google, Yahoo and Bing. Of course, you cannot add a search engine of your choice to the list using this Cydia tweak, but the offered options should prove to be sufficient for most people.
SearchEnable is one of those tweaks that do not make their presence felt all the time, and you can forget all about them after using them just once. After you have grabbed the tweak from the ModMyi repo of the Cydia store, it works its magic automatically and makes the necessary additions to the Search Engine list in the Safari menu of the stock Settings app. Here is a complete list of all the search engines added to Safari’s options by SearchEnable.
- Ask
- Baidu
- blekko
- Sougo
- Volunia
- Yandex
- Evi (TrueKnowledge)
- Wolfram Alpha
Of course, the Google, Yahoo and Bing entries in the list are left undisturbed, and you can revert back to any of those search engines any time you want. The sites added to Safari by SearchEnable are not all famous, but each of them is bound to have some fans, and that is what makes this tweak useful for a wide variety of people. Apart from that, Wolfram Alpha has been gaining considerable fame, and many people might download SearchEnable just for that.
The developer of the SearchEnable tweak has worked on it quite thoroughly, and not even the text in the Safari search box has been ignored. Just as it is with any of the stock search engine choices, the Safari search area will display the name of the selected search site until you tap it once to begin typing. If your favorite search engine didn’t make it to SearchEnable, we can only hope that future updates of the tweak will bring more options to the mix. For now, SearchEnable is available as a free download, and you can give it a try if you are a fan of any of the 8 services we listed above.
