{"id":131,"date":"2009-04-23T10:52:40","date_gmt":"2009-04-23T02:52:40","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/play.datalude.com\/blog\/?p=131"},"modified":"2009-04-23T11:08:23","modified_gmt":"2009-04-23T03:08:23","slug":"ubuntu-firefoxs-tattletale-search-query","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/play.datalude.com\/blog\/2009\/04\/ubuntu-firefoxs-tattletale-search-query\/","title":{"rendered":"Ubuntu Firefox's Tattletale Search Query"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"Search<\/a>Have you ever noticed that when you type a search term into the search box in the top right of your Firefox browser, that a load of junk gets added to the search term. For example, you search for 'banana' and you get something like this:<\/p>\n

http:\/\/www.google.com.ph\/search?q=banana&ie=utf-8&oe=utf-8&aq=t&rls=com.ubuntu:en-US:unofficial&client=firefox-a<\/p>\n

Well what you're effectively doing is giving Google a lot of information for free. Which irritates me. All I really need is this,<\/p>\n

http:\/\/www.google.com.ph\/search?q=banana<\/p>\n

and if they really want to know more about me, then they're welcome to go digging through their logs.<\/p>\n

OK its a minor irritation, but one that we can fix! I understand that Ubuntu does it as part of a deal with Google, but there's no reason why we can't take matters into our own hands and change the defaults.<\/p>\n

So, the file you need to find is this one: \/usr\/lib\/firefox-addons\/searchplugins\/google.xml, and you'll need to open it in an editor as root.\u00a0 So:<\/p>\n

sudo gedit \/usr\/lib\/firefox-addons\/searchplugins\/google.xml<\/pre>\n
If you use another search engine as your default, then choose a different file, of course. With this file open in an editor,\u00a0 remove the offending lines. In the case above, its<\/p>\n
\u00a0 <Param name=\"ie\" value=\"utf-8\"\/>\r\n\u00a0 <Param name=\"oe\" value=\"utf-8\"\/>\r\n\u00a0 <Param name=\"aq\" value=\"t\"\/>\r\n\u00a0 <!-- Dynamic parameters -->\r\n\u00a0 <Param name=\"rls\" value=\"{moz:distributionID}:{moz:locale}:{moz:official}\"\/>\r\n\u00a0 <MozParam name=\"client\" condition=\"defaultEngine\" trueValue=\"firefox-a\" falseValue=\"firefox\"\/><\/pre>\n
Save the file, restart Firefox, and we're good to go.\u00a0 Now the problem is that whenever you upgrade Firefox, the problem reappears, so you might want to make a copy of the correct file, and write a script to replace it every time you upgrade.\u00a0 I always manage to forget where the file is, so I'm blogging this for my own benefit as much as anyone elses …<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Have you ever noticed that when you type a search term into the search box in the top right of your Firefox browser, that a load of junk gets added to the search term. For example, you search for 'banana' and you get something like this: http:\/\/www.google.com.ph\/search?q=banana&ie=utf-8&oe=utf-8&aq=t&rls=com.ubuntu:en-US:unofficial&client=firefox-a Well what you're effectively doing is giving Google … Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_crdt_document":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[1,4],"tags":[68,106,8],"class_list":["post-131","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-it","category-linux","tag-google","tag-search","tag-ubuntu"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/play.datalude.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/131","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/play.datalude.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/play.datalude.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/play.datalude.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/play.datalude.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=131"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/play.datalude.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/131\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/play.datalude.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=131"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/play.datalude.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=131"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/play.datalude.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=131"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}