hello ayande, yes consolidating the search options in the search-bar, address-bar and the default homepage was a deliberate change in firefox 23 by developers. you can use the keyword search extension by mike kaply to work around that though...

Another possibility is to disable keyword search (keyword.enable = false) and use a (one letter) keyword search for searching via the location bar.
You can set a keyword for an installed search engine via Manage Search Engines (click the search engines icon on the search bar).
Then you can easily switch between search engines when searching via the location bar and you also do not have a problem with one word searches.

"consolidating the search options in the search-bar, address-bar and the default homepage was a deliberate change in firefox 23 by developers" ~and why is that? are they pals with add-ons developers? what a stupid, useless move

A lot of malware used to modify the keyword.URL pref to link to a specific search page. To make it easier to prevent this all pages now use the same default search engine.

• bug 738818 - consolidate Firefox search preferences

Please DO NOT comment in bug reports: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/page.cgi?id=etiquette.html

Thank you for your answers everyone. To bad they changed it.