When I switched my default language/locale from en_US.utf8 to ga_IE.utf8, the default search engine in the search bar magically changed from google to ask.com. I could not change it back to google, in fact, the ONLY search engine available is ask.com. Switching the language/locale back to en_US.utf8 appears to fix this problem: google returns as the default search engine and I notice that I have several choices. However this is not an acceptable workaround.