Searching using Cortana with Google and Chrome

If you have Windows 10, you also have Cortana. Cortana has hundreds of features and with every update, Microsoft adds more. Today, I'm going to talk about Cortana's search feature, which has some interesting ups and downs.

Cortana can provide you with instant search results such as definitions, descriptions of people, places, and a lot more. But once you ask something that doesn't have an instant answer to it, Cortana does a Bing search on it through Microsoft Edge. This is one of the main drawbacks when it comes to searching with Cortana. If you don't like using  (more like not used to using) Microsoft Edge or don't like using  (more like not used to using)  Bing, you probably rather prefer to open up your web browser and do the search manually.

This is the point that I hope to touch on in this post. If you do a search for "How to make Cortana search with Google", you will get tons of blog posts. Unfortunately, since Microsoft released their Anniversary update, none of those will work. That method involved using a program to redirect the Cortana search to your default browser instead of Microsoft Edge, and then a Chrome extension to redirect the Bing search to you search engine of choice. We are still going to use the Chrome extension, but the program has been replaced.

Firstly, go ahead and download the Chrome store extension developed by from here. You might see the description showing "Broken until further notice". Ignore it.. it's not broken anymore. Next we will be using a program called "Edge deflector" developed by Daniel Aleksandersen (da2x). Download that from here.

Once you install Edge deflector, anything that automatically opens Edge (even if it's something unrelated to Cortana), will be redirected to your default browser. Don't worry though, you can still open Edge manually. When the Chrome extension is installed, any link that opens anything Bing search related, will automatically be re-searched with Google (or whatever you chose).

So now you're good to go. In my next blog post, I'm going to discuss another use of Cortana search: searching for a program or file.