How To Change Default Safari Search Engine On iPhone 7 And iPhone 7 Plus

When you turn on your iPhone 7 or iPhone 7 Plus and open Safari to enter a phrase or URL, that is technically being entered into a search engine to find the results that will get you the answers. Google, Microsoft and Yahoo are fighting over the rights to become the default search engine for Safari. The good news is that you can customize and change the default search engine used by Safari on the iPhone 7 and iPhone 7 Plus to be either of the big four search engines.

Currently, you can switch the Safari search feature to use either of four major engines, including Google (which is the default option), Yahoo, Bing (the default option used by Siri web searches), or DuckDuckGo. Ultimately which you use is a matter of user preference, and they’re all pretty good options, each with strengths and some with a few weaknesses.

How to Change the Default Safari Search Engine for iPhone 7 and iPhone 7 Plus:

1. Turn on your iPhone 7 or iPhone 7 Plus.
2. Open the Settings app and head to “Safari”
3. Choose “Search Engine” and select one of the four choices to make the new default for Safari: Google, Yahoo, Bing, DuckDuckGo
4. Exit Settings and go back to Safari to test the change

Ultimately the choice is one for each iPhone 7 and iPhone 7 Plus owner to make, as it depends one personal preferences, but some parts of the world can block specific websites and searches, which may make changing the search engine a necessity depending on where you’re accessing the internet from on your iPhone 7 or iPhone 7 Plus. The choice you make here also impacts the web searches performed from Spotlight on iPhone 7 and iPhone 7 Plus, as well as the selected text search tool, but has no impact with the searching on-page text function of Safari, so keep that in mind. Worth noting is that while Google is the default search choice for Safari on iPhone 7 and iPhone 7 Plus, Siri defaults to using Bing. While making a change to Safari does not impact Siri web searches directly, you can issue a command to Siri to use different web search engines like Google or Yahoo if you want to.