Google Suggest - Turn off autocomplete

Google seems to be rolling out new features in a hurry, or in this case, integrating an old one. The official Google blog has announced that the Suggest feature will be available by default on the engine. Judging from the responses of bloggers, it is a love-it or hate-it feature. Personally, I don't care for it much, what with the suggestions coming nowhere near what I want to type in. Indeed, it is more of a distraction than anything.

It is quite easy to turn off too. Just type in - http://www.google.com/webhp?complete=0 and you have it. The feature can be disabled easily using the Preferences link from the homepage as well.

Google sort by date or relevance

Google seems to be testing a new feature. Its News and Blog Search had this feature from the beginning, but seems like you can now sort your web search also by date or relevance. Probably they figured out that people were searching for news and blogs from the main search engine itself, and were shifting often to News and Blog search functionalities to get the latest updates. Maybe they had been working on this for sometime, and the Olympics just came by and users searching for medal tallies just pushed it to the tipping point. (It is worth mentioning that they have been manually tweaking search algorithms for Olympics related content, as has Yahoo and Live search.)

Here is a screenshot that I got a couple of minutes ago. Probably they are rolling it out only to a few users at the moment, as they usually do. Your mileage may vary.



Update - Feb 14, 09: From my web analytics, I can see that more and more people are searching for this feature from all parts of the world. Either Google is rolling it out slowly in test regions, or this has the potential to be an incredibly popular feature.