I have to admit, I see more people asking about how to change the default search engine in Internet Explorer from Bing to Google, but everyone has their favorite, and that’s okay with me! 
There are a couple of different ways you can change what search engine is used within the latest version of the Safari Web browser on your Mac OS X system (and, I expect, Safari on a Windows machine too, though I haven’t verified it).
Let me show you each option…
To start, here’s a search I’m just starting to type in on Safari on my MacBook Pro. Notice that the auto-suggestions are coming from Google as I type:
Safari even nicely shows “Search Google” in the entry box itself.
Okay. But what happens if I click on the tiny magnifying lens?
Turns out you can change just the current search to a specific search engine, and that works even if you just want to compare results quickly from search engine to search engine. The fourth option might be new to you, but it’s the weirdly named DuckDuckGo, a search engine that explicitly does not track anything you do, any searches you submit, etc.
So you could change to Bing here, if you were so inclined, but to change things more permanently go into Settings from the Safari menu on the top left, or use the Cmd-; shortcut.
Again you’ll see the same four options:
More importantly, notice that you can also disable search engine suggestions and make various other tweaks to exactly how search works within Safari. Darn helpful.
That’s all there is to it. If you want to use a different search engine than the four shown, check the Safari Extensions Library as there are a number of additional search engines you can access through adding the appropriate extension to your Safari app.
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