This Chrome Flag Redirects Cortana Search To Your Default Search Engine In Windows 10
Cortana is one of the highlight features in Windows 10 and Microsoft uses the personal assistant to push Bing on to users. It doesn’t look like Cortana will ever have the option to allow users to select which search engine Cortana should use but developers are one step ahead of Microsoft with extensions like bing2google that can redirect the search in your browser. The extension is slow and you can see the redirection happen in the URL bar. Additionally the extension will redirect to Google and if that isn’t your preferred search engine, you will have to search for other options. The other solution lies Chrome v50. It has a flag which when enabled will redirect searches from the Windows 10 desktop to your default search engine.
Go to Chrome://flags, look for the flag named: Windows desktop search redirection preference, and enable it. Relaunch Chrome as directed and anything you search in Cortana will seamlessly be routed through your default search engine. It’s worth mentioning here that Chrome must be set as your default browser.
The flag is relevant only on Windows 10 and not on older versions. If you’re on the stable version of Chrome, you will find that the flag exists there and can be enabled on it too but it doesn’t actually work. For now, you will need to use the Beta channel to get this to work. If it’s simply a matter of redirecting a search to Google, you’re better off using the extension mentioned above. The flag has an edge over the extension because it redirects to your default search engine giving you the freedom to choose whichever search engine you want. Let’s hope Google gets the flag working on the Stable channel soon.
