When typing something into the search bar of Safari on the iPhone and iPad, you’ll see a list of suggestions popup underneath the address bar, offering completions, related searches, and something called Safari Suggestions. Sometimes these are really helpful as they can help search and access things on the web quicker, but sometimes the suggestions are way off, unrelated, or worse. iOS makes it easy to adjust whether or not you see those suggestions however, and we’ll show you how to turn off the Safari suggestions in iOS.
It turns out there are actually two different features with two different settings adjustments, one specifically for search suggestions, and the other for the Safari Suggestions. You can disable both if desired, or just one or the other, and of course this can be reversed at any time if you decide you want the suggestions back again.
How to Disable Safari Suggestions & Safari Search Suggestions in iOS
- Open the “Settings” app in iOS and go to “Safari”
- Under the ‘Search’ section, adjust the following settings as necessary:
- Search Engine Suggestions – disable this to turn off the auto-complete search queries in Safari
- Safari Suggestions – disable this to turn off the pop-up boxes of possibly related material in Safari
Whether or not you like the suggestions feature likely depends on your experience with them. Sometimes the feature is great and highly accurate, whereas other times it leaves much to be desired as completely unrelated material is suggested by Safari in iOS (like the screen shot example up top).
If you find the suggestions to be unrelated, you may try disabling the Safari Suggestions feature but maintaining the Search Engine Suggestions feature, which tends to be more accurate based on what you type. This is what the Search Engine Suggestions look like when enabled:
And here’s what Search Engine Suggestions look like when disabled:
Safari Suggestions in iOS seem like a good idea; you type something in the Safari search bar on your iPhone or iPad, and what you type offers suggestions of completions and related content found on the web. Or at least, that’s how it’s supposed to work. But sometimes you may find that Safari Suggestions are so bad and so inaccurate or off topic, that it borders on trolling. Here is one such example: on iPhone, typing “what is the purpose” in the Safari iOS suggestions bar offers up… wait for it… a Wikipedia article on … Justin Bieber?!? It sounds like a joke, but it isn’t, this is actually what my iPhone is offering me as a suggestion for that phrase entered into Safari. Odd to say the least!
If you don’t like the feature on the iPhone and iPad, you may also disable Safari search suggestions on Mac OS X as well.
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