Today a short article on how to configure Google as default search provider with Microsoft Intune. I show you how to easily configure the search engine for Microsoft Edge and Google Chrome on Windows.
These days it’s very easy to configure Edge and Chrome as most settings are available in the Settings Catalog policy, certainly compared with the days we needed to ingest ADMX files and use custom policies to manage Google Chrome. The only challenge left these days is configuring the right policies together and configuring the correct search provider URL.
Configure the Microsoft Intune policy
To set the default search provider, we create a Settings Catalog policy in the Microsoft Intune admin center.
When signed in to the Intune portal, browse to Devices, Windows, Configuration.
On the configuration tab select +Create to start creating a new Intune policy.
Select Windows 10 and later as Platform.
Select Settings Catalog as Profile type.
Click Create.
Enter a Name and Description (optional) and select Next.
When we now click on Add settings, we are able to search for settings or scroll through the list of settings.
Let’s start with the settings we need to configure for Microsoft Edge. These are found under Microsoft Edge, Default search provider.
Select the following four policy settings:
Configure the new tab page search box experience
Default search provider name
Default search provider search URL
Enable the default search provide
Configure the new tab page search box experience is an optional settings, but without configuring this policy, on the new tab the user is able to search via Bing by default.
Switch all four settings to Enabled.
Select Address bar for the setting Configure the new tab page search box experience.
Enter Google as Default search provider name.
Enter https://www.google.com/search?q={searchTerms} as Default search provider search URL.
We move on with the configuration of Google Chrome. The same policy settings are needed compared to Edge, besides the optional settings.
These settings are found under Google, Google Chrome, Default search provider.
Here we select three settings:
Default search provider name
Default search provider search URL
Enable the default search provider
Move the switch for all three settings to Enabled.
And enter the name (Google) and search URL (https://www.google.nl/search?q={searchTerms}), like we did for Edge.
Finish the configuration of the policy by assigning the policy to related Entra group, or for example to All devices.
The end-result
We can verify the end-result in the settings of Microsoft Edge. Under Privacy, search, and service we find a section that shows we have configured the search engine and the search behavior of the new tab.
In the settings of Google Chrome, under the search engine section, we also see the search engine is configured to use Google.
That’s it for this short post.
Thanks for reading and till next time!
