this problem suddenly happened. typed in the wrong url. the expected behavior is to dipslay an error page. sometimes it goes to google's search result page. but several attempts today leads to ask dot com.

i dont' like this. in addition, it's not my preferred search engine. since when this was changed?

if you try find any related settings in options, you can't find it. i tried that.

this needs to be fixed via about:config. look for keyword.URL and change the value to

http://www.google.com/search?ie=UTF-8&oe=utf-8&q=

the value can also be changed to your preferred search engine. read this.

note: please be careful when editing anything in about:config.