How to Disable Search Suggestions in Safari on Mac OS X

If you’re a Safari user on the Mac, you’ve likely noticed that when you click into the address bar and start typing something to search for, you’ll quickly see suggestions of various things based on what you’re typing. These search engine suggestions can be undeniably useful for some cases, but they can also be completely absurd and sometimes worse.

If you don’t find them helpful, you can turn this feature off and disable the pop-up search suggestions menu when you’re entering text into the Safari URL bar in Mac OS X.

Turning Off Safari Search Suggestions in Mac OS X

1. Open the Safari Mac app if you haven’t done so already and pull down the “Safari” menu, then choose “Preferences”
2. Click on the “Search” tab and under the ‘Search Engine’ section, uncheck the box next to “Include search engine suggestions”



3. Close out of Preferences and return to a regular Safari window, click in the URL bar and enter text as usual – there will no longer be suggested autocompletions offered

Here’s what it looks like after this has been disabled:

And before, where the suggestions pop-under from the URL bar:

This adjustment applies to all search engines in Safari, it doesn’t matter which you use or if you change the default search engine in Safari on the Mac, toggling the search suggestions feature will apply to all of them.

While this suggestion feature is enjoyed by many as it can help speed up searches, turning it off can sometimes have a positive speed effect on older Macs running Safari, simply because it reduces the amount of background activity occurring within the app. Similarly, hiding the favorites and bookmarks dropdown in the URL bar can also offer a small speed boost.