What you see here is the default search results page of Google with the Universal Search feature turned on. The search results are a mix of regular web pages, news stories, image thumbnails, video clips and even blog posts (also see the extreme edition).
The Universal Search feature is activated automatically depending upon your search query and Google doesn’t provide any option to disable Universal search.
Disable Universal Search in Google
There’s however a workaround that will not only help you turn off the Universal Search feature but your search queries will also not get recorded into your Web history even if you are logged into your Google Account.
The trick is that instead of using google.com, you should perform the search on google.com/custom – this is the good old vanilla edition of Google search that doesn’t have a menu bar at the top, the Google Ads are displayed only in the right sidebar and you get only regular web pages in search results.
For example, here’s the regular edition of Google for our original “harry potter” query and here’s the vanilla edition – all the search parameters stay the same except that the word “search” in the URL is replaced with “custom”.
You can add the Google Vanilla addition as a search provider in Firefox or IE using the link above or, if you like to change the address bar search engine in Firefox to Google Vanilla, just open about:config and set the value of keyword.url to google.com/custom?q= as shown in the screeenshot :
This setting will help you search Google without Universal Search results from the address bar while you can use regular Google search from the search box of Firefox.
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