Take Back Your Google Homepage

fade free google homepage

Like millions of others I use Google as my homepage. It’s fast, plain and simple.

Well it was until the bigwigs at G HQ decided we needed some help with searching and a fade effect. So they took it upon themselves to break something that wasn’t broken.

I hate changes to something that doesn’t need changed. I hate improvements to something that doesn’t need improved. I hate having something forced upon me I don’t want.

Google Suggest – the drop down list off suggestions that appears when you start typing – how annoying is that? Are people to lazy to type a few words? Google usually offer alternative search phrases once the initial results are displayed. Isn’t that enough?

Anyway it bugged me and I found this quick and simple solution to get rid of it once and for all. Change your homepage url to the following:

http://www.google.com/webhp?complete=0&hl=en

or

http://www.google.co.uk/webhp?complete=0&hl=en

I tried this using several regional versions of Google and it worked on them all. If you don’t know how to change your homepage, here’s some detailed instructions.

Next up, how to get rid of the useless fade in effect on your Google homepage.

There were several suggested methods for achieving this and I opted for this Greasemonkey script since I use Firefox.

googlesystem.blogspot.com has the answers for IE, Safari and Chrome users.

Now I’m a happy Google user – it’s a shame they didn’t offer easier ways to achieve both tasks but of course, they know what I want and need without asking me, they are of course Google.

Posted on January 22, 2010 | Filed Under Tech