longsliver said

I noticed this started after the last update when Mozilla decided to change the default search provider to Qwant without my permission or knowledge.

Mozilla did no such thing  ! Could it be that you inadvertently downloaded Quant or installed
the add-on  ? Would you check Options => Add-ons => Extensions  ?

Note that you are using an unofficial Waterfox build (55.2.2) instead of an official Firefox build from the Mozilla server that may behave differently.

• https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/all/

cor-el said

Note that you are using an unofficial Waterfox build (55.2.2) instead of an official Firefox build from the Mozilla server that may behave differently.

• https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/all/

Yes, thanks for mentioning that. It was only in the latest update to 55.2.2 that this occurred. Prior to this it's been working fine for the last several years in every iteration I've ever used

If you have the U.S. English build of Firefox, you can inspect the built-in search plugins using this internal address:

resource:///chrome/en-US/locale/browser/searchplugins/

The google.xml file should have this in the template, which is the address used to fetch suggestions:

<Url type="application/x-suggestions+json" method="GET" template="https://www.google.com/complete/search?client=firefox&q={searchTerms}"/>

Assuming that is present and you are using the default Google search plugin rather than one acquired elsewhere, can you think of any extensions or external filters that could be blocking that feature?

I found this in the google.xml file:

<Url rel="self" type="application/opensearchdescription+xml" template="https://www.google.com/searchdomaincheck?format=opensearch"/>
<Url rel="suggestions" type="application/x-suggestions+json" template="https://www.google.com/complete/search?q={searchTerms}&inputencoding={inputEncoding}&outputencoding={outputEncoding}"/>
<Url type="text/html" template="https://www.google.com/search?q={searchTerms}&ie={inputEncoding?}&oe={outputEncoding?}"/>

The bing.xml file has:

-<Url type="application/x-suggestions+json" template="https://www.bing.com/osjson.aspx"><Param name="query" value="{searchTerms}"/>

<Param name="query" value="{searchTerms}"/>
<Param name="form" value="OSDJAS"/>
<Param name="language" value="{moz:locale}"/>

I am also noticing that Yahoo does not return any results. yahoo.xml looks a lot like google.xml:

<Url rel="results" type="text/html" method="get" template="https://search.yahoo.com/search?p={searchTerms}&fr=opensearch"/>
<Url rel="suggestions" type="application/json" template="https://search.yahoo.com/sugg/os?command={searchTerms}&output=fxjson&fr=opensearch"/>
<Url rel="self" type="application/opensearchdescription+xml" template="https://search.yahoo.com/opensearch.xml"/>

Wikipedia search returns suggestions, and its xml file closely resembles the bing.xml file:

<Url type="application/x-suggestions+json" method="GET" template="https://en.wikipedia.org/w/api.php">
<Param name="action" value="opensearch"/>
<Param name="search" value="{searchTerms}"/></Url>

So am I guessing the google.xml file needs to be edited, any idea how I can go about doing that?

I don't understand why your google.xml is different from the Firefox default. You could ask Waterfox support.

You cannot edit built-in searchplugins. Instead, you can select an alternate search plugin for Google. For example, from:

• http://mycroftproject.com/google-search-plugins.html

Thank you, I appreciate all of your help guys. I ended up using another plugin to search Google