Set Google As The Default Search Engine In Office 2013

Those of you who have been using Office 2013 for a long time, probably well aware of the Search with Bing feature. For those who haven’t come across this feature, Office 2013 lets you quickly get additional details about a word or line from the web.

In other words, while viewing or editing an Office 2013 document, you can select a word or line, right-click on it, and then click Search with Bing option to get additional details about the chosen word or line from the web using Bing search engine.

Obviously, Microsoft has set Bing as the default search engine to search the web, and it does a decent job. But if you always prefer Google search over Bing, you can set Google as the default search engine for Office. Since Microsoft Office doesn’t offer a way to change the search engine, we need to edit the Registry to make it happen.

Search with Google in Office 2013

To set Google as the default search engine in Office 2013, please follow the given below instructions.

Step 1: Open Windows Registry Editor by typing Regedit in Start menu search box or Start screen search, and then pressing Enter key.

Alternatively, you can open Run command box, type Regedit in the box, and then press Enter key to launch Registry Editor.

If you see the UAC prompt, click the Yes button.

Step 2: In the Registry Editor, navigate to the following key:

HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Office\15.0\Common\General

Step 3: On the right-side, perform a right-click, click New, click String Value, and name it as SearchProviderName.

Step 4: Double-click SearchProviderName, and enter Google in the Value data box.

In fact, you can type anything from your name to your business name.

Step 5: Next, right-click on the empty area again, click New, click String Value, and name it as SearchProviderURI (no, it’s not URL). Enter the following URL in the box and then click OK.

http://www.google.com/search?q=

That’s it! Close Registry Editor, and restart Office 2013 to apply the changes. Right-click on a selected word or line to see Search with Google option.

To revert to Bing, please delete the above two string values.