How can I make Google the default search provider instead of Bing?

Question

I was wondering if Google could be made the default search engine by pressing the 'Search' button rather than Bing. I'm not sure if Microsoft is okay with this.

Answer 1

Considering Bing is not just used for mere searching, but also integrates with the marketplace, and have support for places, vision, music and voice-search, replacing it with Google would require a large number of Google Services, and not just the search-engine.

For the typical search topic from a mobile phone, Google won't provide you with better results than Bing. In fact, Bing is optimized towards human searches (typical done from handheld devices), where as Google is optimized towards content-searches (typically done from a PC).

Answer 2

From a Microsoft Answers post:

The default search engine is indeed set by the provider. At the moment, there is no way for the end-user to override this default. Many have asked for this feature, and I really hope we get it in a future update as the current behavior is anything but user-friendly.

So there doesn't seem to be an official way at the moment.

There is a homebrew tool that could allow this, but you'd need a developer-unlocked phone, and it only seems to change the behavior of the button within IE, not system-wide.