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This post may be pretty basic for many people but I’ve decided I should write-up a quick article about it anyway. I frequently come into contact with people who love using Google and have it set as their default search engine, yet they don’t customize it to their preferences.

There are a variety of settings you can set to tell Google search to act the way you want it to act. If you want to access all of these options, just look for the “Settings” link in the top, right-hand corner of the screen on the main Google search page.

• Interface Language – what language do you want Google to use for you
• Search Language – I’m really only interested in seeing pages in English, no need to clutter my view with search results in other languages
• SafeSearch Filtering – If I’m not interested in accidentally getting some search results that my not be appropriate for my personal preferences or safe-for-work
• Number of Results – with faster Internet speeds you may save some time by showing more results per page. The minimum is 10, maximum is 100.
• Results Window – my personal favorite, when I click on a search result I want it to open in a new window so I don’t lose my search results listing on Google
• Query Suggestions – let Google help you fine-tune your search results to get better results for what you’re looking for online
• Search Wiki – a fairly new option, but this allows you to modify and see modified search results by the Google community of users
• Subscribed Links – a very powerful feature, this lets you build collections of pages that you want to search for on specific terms or phrases

When you’re done, just make sure you click on the “Save Preferences” options.

As you can see, there’s plenty of ways for you to customize your user-experience. Now you can really show your friends that you know how to manipulate the Google machine.

For quite some time I’ve had a personal software rule that I would no longer install Apple software on my laptop PC. No iTunes or QuickTime for me. The reason I made that decision is because of the problem I’m having now.

There are a couple of websites I use regularly that continually wanted me to install the QuickTime application so I could enjoy the website in all its glory. I finally caved in and decided to give QuickTime another try.

Then I kept getting updates and updates that kept wanting me to install iTunes and Safari along with my QuickTime updates. It just gets annoying and I decided I’ve had enough. So I uninstalled everything again. Then I start getting the message window above. I couldn’t figure out how to turn everything off so I set-out for an answer.

I’d recently heard about the hidden options for Mozilla Firefox with the about:config settings. After searching around for some keywords I finally found two that seem to be doing the trick.

In the “Filter:” section on the config tools look for the following:

• plugin.scan.plid.all
• plugin.default_plugin_disabled

On both of these items set the “Value” to “false” and close and restart Firefox.

Since I’ve done this I haven’t had the warnings about the QuickTime plugin. I’m hoping it stays that way.