Monday, June 30, 2014

Windows phone users who hate Bing, rejoice!

Yes, for those of you who actually use a Windows phone, but hate when you press the search home button and Bing pops up, I've found a way to make Google come up instead. Mine is a Nokia Lumia 920, but I know this trick works on other brands as well.

The trick is to set your set your browser search language in settings. I thought this was a joke at first, but it works!

To get started, access your phones settings. From the main screen you can swipe to the right for the app menu and go down to Settings. Once in Settings, swipe down and choose the language+region settings. At the bottom of this option is the setting for Browser and search language. From the list which comes up, choose and select Bashkir (Russia). Press the center home button to return to the main screen and then power off your phone.

Power on your phone once it has completely shut down and hit the hourglass button on the right bottom. To your amazement, the Google search screen will appear!

I've heard from some that this messes up YouTube as it appears in Russian, but that was not the case for me. YouTube works the same as it always has on my phone.

To see a demo of this fix, you can watch this YouTube video:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BWwViHOtzpc

BTW, it shows in the video choosing plain russian, but I knew from reading other posts on the subject that the one I recommended works. This may be the reason why my YouTube didn't change to russian, which is a good thing.