Default Google search with Linux Mint

So I am fairly new to Linux, and am LOVING it. I mean sure, there are lots of things that are different, a few things I don't like as much.. but overall, I am really impressed. I started with Ubuntu as it seems to be the most popular distro out there. Then I found Linux Mint and knew there was something special here.

One of my biggest annoyances at this point is how Linux Mint adds in it's own custom "stuff" to the standard Google search. I don't really mind that they add in advertising to help support their software efforts... I mean, this is really amazing... but honestly their ads are huge, the search results are not standard Google results.

So I did what every good user does... I googled the easiest way to fix the issue of non standard search results. The problem was, I didn't really find anything that really worked.

So what is the solution? Simple, replace most of the google.xml found in your file system with one found in the standard Firefox download. So here you go...

1. Download Firefox from getfirefox.org.
2. Extract the files to an easy to access location, such as your desktop.
3. Search for all google.xml files in your filesystem.
4. Compare the content of each of those files with the one from your recent download, making note of each one that has a similar structure.
5. Copy the google.xml from the download over each of the files you noted from step 4. You may need to run the cp command as root (e.g. sudo cp ~/Desktop/firefox/searchplugins /usr/lib/firefox-3.6/searchplugins).

That's all. Hope this helps you out!