Customize Google home page and search results using CustomizeGoogle

Posted on October 10, 2008 at 5:39 am

I have always loved Google’s incredibly empty and clean search page, it’s focused on just one thing: finding what you want. But I also wish I could customize some aspects of the site, such as adding links competing sites for normal search (Yahoo) and image search (Flickr, etc), make my searching anonymous, block out advertisements, etc. Earlier I wrote about you can customize your Google search preferences, but that’s simple stuff.

CustomizeGoogle is a great Firefox extension that lets you customize hundreds of aspects of the Google home page and of the search results. Once you install the add-on, click on Tools and go to CustomizeGoogle options. Here you will find a plethora of cool options!

On the Web tab, there are many options you can set to customize the search results including:

Remove ads from search result pages
Add a position counter for each search result
Enable filters (add sites in Filters if you don’t want certain sites to show up)
Add links to WayBackMachine so you can see what a website looked like long ago
Remove click tracking (no cookies stored)
Stream search results so you don’t have to click page 2, 3, etc
Show favicons for each website
Add links to quickly bookmark or save a webpage

And that’s just the Web tab!! I won’t go through all of them, but if you click on Gmail, for example, you can make sure that you always use it via a secure connection by checking the secure box. You can also remove that annoying Invite box and other items from the Gmail interface.

You can also block Google Analytics cookies if you do not want your visit to a site to be trackable. My favorite option is the filter because there are still many times when a website will show up in the search results that is purely spam! Just add it to the filter and it will never show up again!

Overall, it’s a neat way to customize Google and I’m sure they will be coming out with many more options in the future! Enjoy!

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