After installing an app last weekend I've had Crawler.com hijack my browser to be my default search engine. I didn't tell Crawler.com to do that so I'm pretty pissed off with them and every attempt to uninstall the damned search engine has failed.

The hijack doesn't appear to have had a massive effect on boosting their brand awareness except, in my case, in a very negative way. I know Alexa isn't the perfect guage of site usage, but a quick squint at the traffic details for crawler.com shows that their rank and page views have increased but that their reach has gone down. It should all be going down for their cynical installation strategy.

So how do you remove Crawler.com from Firefox?

Well, after a quick search on the web, using Google.co.uk, I found that in Firefox you need to do the following:

In the address bar enter about:config

Look for the following entries as these were the ones that had been hijacked on my Firefox:

browser.search.defaultenginename
browser.search.order.1

My entries here were Crawler Search so I changed them to Google.co.uk

Bugger! That didn't work. What was I missing? I searched through the settings and figured that all the ones in BOLD were user defined, so I ran through just those one s and found:

keyword.URL

THIS was the last setting to still have Crawler in it, so I right-clicked the entry and selected the last option: RESET.

That cured my Crawler hijack problem. Good riddance.

Labels: browsers, firefox, search, tips

Firefox 3 Beta 5 is out and, although it's a nice bit of kit, I only really wanted to post about it because of the awesome piece of design on the FF3b5 welcome page.

The gorgeous picture accompanying the FF3b5 homepage is of a giant retro robot being built in a utopian setting - very much Sky Captain style but with more colour ;)

Labels: browsers, firefox

When you search Google you tend to get a ton of extra data the sometimes you're really not looking for.

Normally you see, in a Google results page, the following data:

[title]
[description]
[link]

When you're looking for something in a hurry e.g. checking out other competitors in the SEO game, you often need to peruse the results pages fast!

So how do you compact Google search results?

I just happened to stumbleupon DaveN's blog whilst Googling for the pros & cons of having a UK website at a US IP address and I noticed his greasemonkey scripts page.

Now I haven't used Greasemonkey in a while but it's a handy little plugin for the Firefox web browser.

On Dave's page there's a totally handy little Google search compactor script for Greasemonkey.

Really handy, give it a try.

Labels: firefox, google, greasemonkey, scripts, seo, tools