Googles new Predictive Search

[maniac]

I've noticed this has been on google for a few weeks now, but I didn't really think about it until our LRC manager brought it to my attention that it's coming up with some quite in-appropreate suggestions sometimes for students when they're searching.

 

for instance type in 'How long does' and the first hits you get is 'how long does cocane stay in your system' which we'd rather the kids wern't searching for. They still can't get on any websites they shouldn't of course, but we'd rather ideas for searches like this wern't put in their heads to start with, as now they keep typing in words to see what it suggests searching for.

 

Anyone know if you can turn this feature off, or block access to the servers that perform it?

 

Mike.

[timbo343]

ah, ive found it. Next to the google search box is preferences... go into this and scroll down to the bottom to "Query Suggestions".

[timbo343]

interesting:

 

How I can permanently remove "Query Suggestions" from Google browser? - Using Web Search | Google Groups

[maniac]

Just found in my own course of reseach that you can block clients1.google.com and it stops it working. Result!

[timbo343]

nice one!

[plexer]

It doesn't do it if you use the firefox version.

 

Mozilla Firefox Start Page

 

Ben

[powdarrmonkey]

Ok, after a bit of digging, the URL to do this is made up of:

 

*.google.[extension]/complete/search?[various parameters]&q=[search term]

 

(so a typical example: http://www.google.co.uk/complete/search?hl=en&gl=uk&q=Edugeek)

 

If you filter on a criteria that matches this, (eg. google.*/complete) you'll block the autocompletion.

 

(yay for tcpdump! )