Google Quick Tip: Turn off Google Instant and Autocomplete permanently
If you’re like us and you hate Google’s Instant and Autocomplete features, here’s a quick and easy solution for you…
You can change these settings by selecting “Settings -> Search Settings” from your Google page in the top right hand corner of the page and selecting the appropriate checkboxes then selecting save.
HOWEVER
Doing that just doesn’t work at all and suddenly Instant and Autocomplete is back on, before switching to an even worse search engine, follow the steps below to Instant & Autocomplete freedom!
Step 1:
Copy and paste this url into your browser’s url bar: http://www.google.com/webhp?complete=0&hl=en
Step 2: (Optional)
Change the url to whichever Google uses in your country, for example, in South Africa Google uses .co.za instead of .com. Now the url looks like this: http://www.google.co.za/webhp?complete=0&hl=en
For a complete list of country domains go to Wikipedia’s list of top level domains.
Step 3: (Optional)
If you don’t want English as your display language on Google you can change it to whichever one you prefer by changing the “hl” parameter from “en” to something else. For example, in South Africa we can set it to “af” and it will display Afrikaans as the language. The url would now look something similar to this: http://www.google.co.za/webhp?complete=0&hl=af
For a complete list of language abbreviations go to Wikipedia’s ISO 639-1 codes.
Step 4:
Hit return/enter on your keyboard to go to the url, now simply set the url as your homepage or one of your homepages and voila!
Thank you for reading this tutorial, your comments, as always, are welcome and appreciated…
Thanks for this, Google instant is the worst invention ever!