How to Turn Off Google Trending Searches

[Morbius]

Hello there,

 

We have Google Workspace for Education here in school with around 500 Chromebooks.

 

A teacher has emailed me today, stating that she was setting up a Chromebook for a student to use when she noticed that the top trending Google search on the day was for Andrew Tate.

When she clicked on it, it took her straight to a very unsuitable page where his views regarding women was shown.

 

I have been asked to turn off Google trending searches for all Chromebooks but I cannot find such a setting in the Admin console.

 

The only thing I can find on the internet is how to do this as an individual user by going in to Settings on the bottom right of the Google home page, choosing Search Settings and then toggling the option in the section called "Auto-complete with trending searches" to, "Do not show popular searches".

 

As this is not a realistic option for me, I contacted Google Support via their Chat App. The agent stated that they don't have a setting to turn off just Trending searches, but that they have a workaround.

 

The workaround is apparently to disable the policy "SafeSearch for Google Search queries".

 

From the Admin console "Devices"> "Chrome"> "Settings"> "Users & browsers".

 

On the tab "Content", look for the policy "SafeSearch for Google Search queries".

 

Configure the policy as "Do not enforce SafeSearch for Google Search queries".

 

The agent assured me that when she changed that setting on her test account, the trending searches went away.

 

I am doubtful that this will give me the desired outcome. I have changed this setting on a test OU but it seems counter-intuitive to me. It's been over an hour now and my Chromebook still shows these trending searches.

 

Does anyone know if this will work or does anyone know of any other way I can turn these trending searches off?

[DavidYoung]

I would suggest that is a bad idea and not great advice from Google!

 

I have done a quick test with google search and it seems that trending searches are served from https://www.google.com/complete/search. If you add that address to the URL Blocklist setting in the admin console it should block the trending searches.

 

Please test this before rolling it out as I have just quickly found it and don't know what impact it may have on other things but blocking it doesn't seem to break search.

 

Information about the URLblocklist setting can be found here: https://support.google.com/chrome/a/answer/7532419?hl=en

 

David

[Morbius]

Thanks for the suggestion, David.

 

Unfortunately, this doesn't seem to have worked. The trending searches when you tap on the search bar on Google's home page are still updating.

 

I can't believe there is no way to turn this off in the admin console.

 

Any other ideas?

[DavidYoung]

Ah, the Google policy probably doesn't process XHR requests then, only main/subframe requests which is actually the same as the on-device filter we operate for performance reasons.

 

The other option would be to look at your network web filter. IF you have HTTPS decryption available, you could block that URL there.