Windows Tools, Help & Guides

• Tweet
• Email

When you search on Google, often you click on an applicable result – to find that you arrive at a registration page.

The reason is that there are some websites that allow Google to browse for content, but not you.

With this easy hack, you can disguise yourself as Google by changing your browser’s identity (named user agent) to Googlebot.

I will explain how to do this in the major two browsers: Mozilla Firefox and Internet Explorer – I am unsure of how to do this in Safari, Opera etc. Please send me a message if you know how to.

Firefox

1. Type in about:config in the address bar.
2. Scroll down to “general.useragent.extra.firefox“.
3. Double click on it and type in “Googlebot 2.1“.
4. This will change Firefox user agent to the google bot.
5. When you are done, click Reset to restore the property to its default value.

Internet Explorer

1. Download this zip file, and extract the .reg file.
2. Now double-click the .reg file to merge it into Windows registry.
3. When you are done, merge this reg file into the Windows registry. This will return the user agent to the default.

Have fun.

About Rich

Rich is the owner and creator of Windows Guides; he spends his time breaking things on his PC so he can write how-to guides to fix the problems he creates.

Web | Twitter | Facebook | LinkedIn | Google+ | More Posts (1021)