hello dealightful23, the reasons for changing the default us search provider in firefox to yahoo are explained in https://blog.mozilla.org/blog/2014/11/19/promoting-choice-and-innovation-on-the-web/

you are of course free as always to set your personally preferred search engine like google or any other choice as your default:

• Click the menu button and choose Options on Windows or Preferences on Mac or Linux, then select the Search settings panel.
• Click on the magnifying glass icon in the Search bar, then click on Change Search Settings, as shown here:

In the Search settings panel that opens, select a different search engine from the drop-down menu (see this screenshot).

For more information, see the article Search bar - add, change and manage search engines on Firefox.

After following your instructions, the URL bar isn't responding to any searches except to take me directly to a website. It does not bring up the typical Google web results page. Please advise.

can you try to replicate this behaviour when you launch firefox in safe mode once? if not, maybe an addon is interfering here...

Troubleshoot extensions, themes and hardware acceleration issues to solve common Firefox problems

I had just tried an add-on for putting the keyword.URL back. I removed the add-on and it works great!! Many thanks!!!

You can use the Keyword Search extension to specify which search engine to use for searching via the location/address bar.

• https://addons.mozilla.org/firefox/addon/keyword-search/

It's just not nice for a program to allow me to make a change to the default search and then to delete that change every time it installs an update. The could so easily leave it at what you have set it to that it is ridiculous. I mean Easy.

It is likely that you have security software or other software interfering that either keeps a handle on files or otherwise prevents updating files properly. Firefox may reset preferences if some pref settings fail to update properly and still show an older Firefox version. You would have to check the setting in such software or switch to software that doesn't have this behavior.

The problem is on all computer as far as I know. I have seen the default search changed on about 100 machines. I support 2000 machines. I've had to fix this so many times no matter what antivirus I have from AVG to Norton to Kaspersky to Microsoft Security Essentials. When an update occurs there is a vested reason why it would be changed to yahoo by choice of the software installation. The software installation could easily keep the current settings but it does not as of yet. I hope the developers are listening - I actually have been turning down/not installing updates for a month or so.