Google Insight/Predictive Text – OFF
September 5, 2011
Google has has this feature for a while now. You go to type in your search and it tries to complete the words for you. This drives me absolutely insane. I hate it. I have turned it off in the settings, only to have it turn itself back on a few days later. Now it seems they’ve made it impossible to do anything about it at all. Thankfully, I found ways around it.
So on my one laptop, I have an older version of the Firefox browser and instead of using www.google.com to look something up, I have been using, http://www.google.com/firefox because that completely eliminates any issues with insight. I don’t even have to change the settings. Problem solved, right? Well, not so much. On my other computer, I have the most recent Firefox browser and the google.com/firefox url redirects and reverts to the most recent google.com site. I panicked for a bit before finally finding another alternative: http://www.google.com/webhp?complete=0 So there you have it. If you want to turn off google insight (or at least not have to worry about constantly changing the settings), use one of these urls instead.
