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why wont the search box not work

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  • Last reply by cor-el

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the mag glass has a green plus by and the search features do not work at all i have tried anything i can find no answer please help

the mag glass has a green plus by and the search features do not work at all i have tried anything i can find no answer please help

Chosen solution

The green plus indicates that the current website has a search plugin you can install if you like. That probably isn't related to the problem.

Are you having problems with the search bar on the right end of the toolbar, or the search box in one of Firefox's internal pages, such as the built-in home page or the new tab page?

With the search bar on the toolbar, normally, as soon as you start typing or if you click it with text already in it, the panel of buttons drops down. Is that happening? Then as you type there may be suggestions from your default search engine. Do you get those? And finally to search you can press Enter or click the arrow. No result?

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Chosen Solution

The green plus indicates that the current website has a search plugin you can install if you like. That probably isn't related to the problem.

Are you having problems with the search bar on the right end of the toolbar, or the search box in one of Firefox's internal pages, such as the built-in home page or the new tab page?

With the search bar on the toolbar, normally, as soon as you start typing or if you click it with text already in it, the panel of buttons drops down. Is that happening? Then as you type there may be suggestions from your default search engine. Do you get those? And finally to search you can press Enter or click the arrow. No result?

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You can check if you have the XML files of the default search engines including Google in the browser\searchplugins folder in the Firefox program folder.

If not then you need to reinstall Firefox.

You can find the full version of the current current Firefox release (39.0) in all languages and all operating systems here:

Try to delete the search.json file and possible search-metadata.json and search.sqlite files in the Firefox profile folder to reset the search engines to the default.

You can use this button to go to the current Firefox profile folder:

Firefox will rebuild the search.json file from the default search engines in the "browser\searchplugins" folder in the Firefox program folder and the searchplugins folder in the Firefox profile folder.