How to Use Google for Safari Search on Your iPhone or iPad

by Lowell Heddings on

You might be asking yourself why we’d write an article about how to switch to Google as your default search engine on the iPhone or iPad when it’s already the default. The answer is simple: rumors are that Apple might switch the iOS default search engine to Yahoo or Bing at some point in the future.

Luckily you’ll have already read this article and you’ll know how to switch the default search engine. And, of course, if you wanted to switch to Bing or Yahoo or DuckDuckGo, you can use this same technique to do that. Although with the exception of the last one, we’re not sure why you’d want to.

So if you’re wondering how to stop using Bing or Yahoo as your search engine, you’re in the right place.

How to Set Google Search as the Default Search Engine on iPhone or iPad

Luckily changing the search engine is really simple. Just open up your Settings app, find Safari in the list on the left-hand pane, and then choose the Search Engine option. You can see in our screenshot that it’s already set to Google.

You could choose to change your search engine to Yahoo or Bing, but the only other search engine we’d actually recommend for anybody is DuckDuckGo, and then only if you are really worried about Google knowing what you are searching.

Personally we don’t care, Google is the best, and we’re going to always use them for finding things. Judging by our audience statistics, 96 percent of our readers prefer Google as well.

Lowell Heddings is the founder and Editor-in-Chief of How-To Geek. He spends all his free time making sure this site can bring you fresh geekery on a daily basis, and has been doing so for over eleven years.