Theres an aweful lot of noise about Google instant, some people love it, some really hate it so if Google instant is really not your thing then you can turn it off by
Clicking on “Settings” » “Search Settings.” Then go to the bottom of the page and turn off “Instant Search”
Simples!


Thanks for that. My problem was that the search was not even working for me. Had to delete my cookies and cache.
Except judging by the comments and complaints elsewhere a lot of people don’t seem to be able to turn off Google Instant, myself included. I am firmly in the “hate it” camp.
One of the attractions of using Google was always its simplicity. They now seem to have got caught up in a frenzy of feature creep that is actually making the site less and less attractive and, perversely, less and less usable. I hate what they’ve done to the image search, for example.
The only thing that keeps me going back to Google is that their results seem to be more comprehensive than anybody else’s.
This is because BING looks like its going to rock. but its a different animal to Google. From the videos that went around for bing originally, you’d never need to click on a search result as bing scraped and collated all relevant data from the sites listed and presented a custom search result comparing product prices, reviews and loads more.I think google is a bit schizoid at the moment as they deviate from true search.
This works for me, thankfully. Like Steve, I liked Google’s simplicity, but they have really made a few big mistakes of late.
I’m really hoping Bing can get competitive here in the UK though, as I’d now like a change from Google.