I had to do this a while back and it's nearly made me punch my monitor. The lowest circle of hell for the person/people who decided putting this basic functionality behind a fucking arcane flag. Few things make me more mad than having my finite life wasted hunting down solutions to problems that have no reason to exist.
In Firefox, there is a way that doesn't require a flag: create a bookmark with the url, and set its "keyword" field to the trigger word you want for the engine.
That works in chrome/edge too. (Even better, Edge matches urls with %s very good, and the URL bar offers past searches as suggestions better than Firefox does.)
They removed most bookmarks and search engine settings, but bookmarks with keywords work fine at the moment, for both mayor desktop browsers.
Also you can store them in a file(!) and import them for a nice cross browser experience, keeping track of them, and not losing them.
* Go to `about:config`
* Change `browser.urlbar.update2.engineAliasRefresh` to true
* Now you can go to `about:preferences#search`
* ...and click the "Add" button below Search Shortcuts
* Add `https://www.google.com/search?q=%s&udm=14` as your URL.
* Set the name to "Google Web" or whatever you prefer and choose a keyword. You can also change your default search engine or other preferences.
[0] https://superuser.com/a/1756774/40115