How to set up Google search in Firefox to closest resemble how I use it in Chrome?

Question

1st) I go to https://www.google.com/ncr [No Country Redirect, see: https://support.google.com/websearch/answer/873?hl=en]
2nd) My setup how I search on Google in Chrome by default is the following:
https://www.google.com/search?q=%s&hl=
If I want to search on No Country Redirect land, I simple press Ctrl+E [which brings me to default search] and enter my [search term], which will result in: https://www.google.com/search?q=search+term&hl=
Now if I want to search in a specific language (which I often need) other than English, some easy modifications:
For example, German: https://www.google.com/search?q=search+term&hl=DE
For example, French: https://www.google.com/search?q=search+term&hl=FR
That's it.
I don't understand what are these lots of [aqswdefrgthyjukiolkijuhygtfrdesasd] long strings in the default Firefox version of Google are, and why I should trust them? You might get a kickback for that from Google but sorry, that's not my business. :(
[Philosophical question: why are simple things in Firefox so much more complicated than in Chrome?]

Answer 1

Firefox doesn't have a handy built-in interface for editing search strings. Instead, it uses search plugins, small .xml files based on the OpenSearch standard. You can find these files on the Add-ons site, on the Mycroft site (example: [http://mycroftproject.com/google-search-plugins.html]), and elsewhere. Many sites offer them, in which case a green + appears on the icon in the search bar.
You also can create your own custom search plugins. If you open the standard google.xml plugin in Firefox or IE as a page*, you can see the categories of data it contains. Most of it is encoded icons (using encoded icons means Firefox doesn't have to link out to a site to fetch the icon, potentially introducing a tracking issue). Toward the end you see how the query is constructed.
For example, if you search for Firefox using the standard Google plugin, the results page is:
https://www.google.com/search?q=Firefox&ie=utf-8&oe=utf-8
You can see from the plugin how this is constructed (toward the bottom):
<Url type="text/html" method="GET" template="https://www.google.com/search" rel="searchform">
<Param name="q" value="{searchTerms}"/>
<Param name="ie" value="utf-8"/>
<Param name="oe" value="utf-8"/>
</Url>
And if you wanted to change that, you could copy and edit the file to your preferred parameters. Interested?
''* On 32-bit Windows 7, the google.xml file is in this folder:''
C:\Program Files\Mozilla Firefox\browser\searchplugins