I am curious if anyone else would like to initiate their own choice for a search provider as their default search engine rather than the lame choices (IMHO) that are now offered? The 2 I mentioned are very secure so what is opera's issue to allow this choice like they used to before google $$$$ took this choice away (IMHO)?

[Closed as a duplicate of https://forums.opera.com/topic/480/opera-should-get-rid-of-google]

You can change it to Bing, Yahoo!, Yandex in some regions and even Baidu in others I believe. Workarounds like the Disconnect Search extension and keywords are available for other search engines. Case closed.
Other topics talk about the same thing but yours start with a lie.

I understand what flexman meant, he would like to choose his personal choice for his browser use,as would many other users. Opera developers have been bought out by the google $$$ carrot. For those who want to use any other search engines other than the lame one's opera chooses that are not more secure than startpage or duckduckgo as they would like you to believe. So to those who want to customize their browser I suggest they look elsewhere as I have until opera developers allow users the choice they deserve as many other top browser developers offer. Opera developers used to lead but now follow the heels of google....too bad.

All I did was uninstall 12.15 and loaded in 12.14 / 64 bit, so I will live with any bugs in 12.14 because it allows me to delete google and load in startpage as my default search engine. I'd rather wait and see if this issue is fixed and if not, well 12.14 never gave me too much trouble, (well java has been a issue with Opera but I will live with it). Now as for a free browser, yes Opera has been free but if they fix the issue I would pay to use Opera if they would need to charge for their browser.
"Even MS IE10 allows me change to startpage as my default search engine without issue."

I am using Version12.15, Build1748, Platform x64, SystemWindows 7 and I deleted Google from the search engine list and replaced Startpage as my default search engine and every time I restart, Google reappears and becomes the default search engine. I reported this issue but Opera support referred me to the forums. I can see that a lot of others share the same concerns about Google and Opera. I use Opera to rid myself from google and also the ability to customize my browser. This has changed now with this issue. To me this is a big issue and not just a bug. I hope Opera will reconsider the handshake between Opera and Google, if not I will have to reconsider my options.