Aug 26, 2008

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.

7 comments:

Anonymous said...

absolutely HATE it!!!! also hate the fact that I cant turn it off! even I closed it, it keeps coming back. HATE HATE it.

Anonymous said...

it sucks because it puts in google suggestions at the cost of not showing what I've searched in the past - Which was a lot more helpful.

Pageturners said...

Where do you type that in? I can't see it, and I can't see a Preferences item anywhere on my homepage either.

Please tell me how to turn off this infuriating 'feature'.

Ranjit said...

@Pageturners,

You need to type in that address in the address/location bar of the browser. (You can also bookmark/add it to favorites for later use.) That will set a cookie value in your computer that tells Google you don't want the Autocomplete feature. Hope that helps. Leave me a comment if you still have any problem.

Cheers!

Pageturners said...

Actually it's not so much in Google searches I want to turn it off (though this hasn't worked either; even deleting all cookies didn't do it).

What I truly hate is the way it autocompletes the data field when you're trying to put keywords in a Blogger post, so that typing in 'funny' immediatly invokes a line including 'Belfast', 'chicklit', etc.

Unknown said...

Awful, awful. We use IE6 for a number of clinical systems - google suggest just crashes the browser. Google must be aware of it and don't do anything about it. Thanks for the solution

Anonymous said...

Hi, just caught up with your thread. Am having same problem with google autocomplete, it won't leave me alone! Tried typing in web address.http://www.google.com/webhp?complete=0
Didn't work, tried going through google settings....didn't work.
Now What!!!