Disable Search Suggest at Google

Mar 25, 2008

Google recently enabled "Search Suggest" at their official home page. I find this feature annoying, and I wanted a way to disable it. Thankfully, the solution was very simple:

  1. Visit the Search Preferences page
  2. Set the Query Suggestions option to "Do not provide query suggestions in the search box"
  3. Save your preferences

I wish Google had made disabling this a little clearer, rather than quietly adding the preference to the preferences page.

how-to
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4 Comments

Dustin

10:25 PM on Mar 27, 2008
Why are you using the google home page? Don't you have a google search bar in your browser? :)

Jonah

10:49 PM on Mar 27, 2008
Ha, I've thought about that fact more than once. I've gotten into a bad habit of doing all my one-off, "throw away" searches from the Google home page. For stuff I'm more likely to come back to, I'll search from Googlebar Lite. I need to get over that and do everything from the toolbar.

Max

2:16 PM on Apr 10, 2008
I think its right wha zou are saying google is that thing.

me

4:47 AM on Aug 26, 2008
I hate search assistant, it's so annoying to me and I can't imagine what idiot would actually like it... wait, actually I can, my grandma would probably like this. Anyway, this fix only works as long as you don't clear your cookies when you close Firefox. If you set your privacy to clear out all that info then you're stuck having to go back to that preference and changing it again, every time. Also, why is it actually checked and require you to uncheck, hten recheck it for it to stop functioning? Are Google programmers that thick and have that bad of quality control that they don't even bother to test such an easily testable function? I'm liking Google less and less these days.

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