How To Disable Google Realtime Search

A week ago, Google introduced real-time search – a new feature that displays live updates from sites like Twitter and FriendFeed as part of the normal search results. Reactions were generally positive, but, as multiple users noted, there was one thing missing – an “off” button. You could pause the live updates, but not get rid of them entirely – until today. Today, I present you a way to remove the realtime search widget from your Google results.

Disable Google Realtime Search

I’ve written a Greasemonkey script that hides the “Latest results for “keyword”” box. It also suspends the live updates, preventing Google from wasting your bandwidth needlessly. Just install this userscript, and you won’t see the real-time results again.

Install “Disable Google Realtime Search” (2 KB)

Compatible browsers :

Sidenote : Even with this script installed, you can still access the realtime results directly by clicking on the “Latest updates” link in search options.

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This entry was posted on Monday, December 14th, 2009 at 18:55 and is filed under Browser Extensions. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

6 Responses to “How To Disable Google Realtime Search”

  1. Bryce E Bob says:
    December 15, 2009 at 17:24

    Could this be done for Safari as well?

  2. White Shadow says:
    December 15, 2009 at 17:29

    Theoretically, though I haven’t tried it myself. See this tutorial.

  3. Ross says:
    December 16, 2009 at 05:50

    Thank god. I got my first search result that had the updating realtime results in it and holy useless shit Batman! What use is this other than to get people’s crappy Twitters about a topic?

  4. Nicholas says:
    December 16, 2009 at 06:46

    Ugh, I totally agree. I use firefox’s awesomebar for most of my site pulling up, and guess what happens if the almighty google decides that latest results are on top of the list? You get their search page instead of the usual “lucky search” result. Totally broken.

    Is there a way to fix the awesomebar results if they are redirected because of this “feature”? I mean until they provide a way to turn the feature off of course, because I can’t possibly be the only one that doesn’t give a flying twat about Twitter.

  5. Popop says:
    April 22, 2010 at 12:36

    Is there an updated version of this? It doesn’t seem to work anymore.

  6. White Shadow says:
    April 22, 2010 at 18:40

    Yep, it’s broken. I’ll fix it when I have time.

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