Despite making noai.duckduckgo.com my deafault search it keeps using regular ddg. Saw previous archived question and you answered devs still looking into it, and preferred answer was reinstalling firefox worked. That is too dificult,

The old thread does not necessarily have to be relevant today. How does your issue exhibit? You have successfully added a custom search provider with the placeholder URL, set it as default, the provider works, you use it to search, and… the resulting URL is wrong?

(Is this a mobile Firefox iOS issue? This seems posted from desktop Windows, just double checking.)

If you change the custom search entry URL to something bogus… does it navigate to such bogus location, or you still get the ddg you've already previously unselected even though?

Hi jbr, Thanks for the quick response. I am using desktop. It was just using regular ddg. When I opened firefox just now to check my email I did a search and now it is using the noai ddg. I don't know why it is working now, I had previously shut firefox and reopened it and it didn't work.

Generally it's supposed to just work. Chances are ddg redirected the noai subdomain to their normal host for a bit for whatever reason, which is something that's beyond control of the search entry — once it submits to the custom URL, the browser doesn't have much say whether the provider honors it or shows/redirects something else.

If you ever see it again, you can open the network inspector and track the requests if they went out correctly, and perhaps only then came back redirected to something else from ddg side.

If you're suspecting the actual selected search provider is not being picked up, I'd just edit it to shove some unrelated URL there, to verify if that's being used now, or not at all. (I.e. something that's either under your control, or unrelated like wikiart search you could tell apart from ddg just doing something in the background…)