shewhomust | Other search engines are also available.

For some reason - and I hope it's nothing serious, but my computer has been a little flaky of late, and I fear worse to come - all of the accounts I keep logged in have become logged out: LJ, Flickr, Amazon, I had to log back in to all of them.

And Google. After my last contretemps with Google (the one where it wanted to give me local results) I had found a combination of settings I could live with (the option of a puffin picture at the top of the screen sweetened the pill). That too had vanished, and I can't find it. I've found the link at the bottom of the screen which allows me access to google.com, but the puffins are gone, and there is an infuriating autocomplete feature which guesses what I might be going to type and supplies search results corresponding to its guesses, so that all the time I am trying to type, semi-random text flickers distractingly across the screen. This is weird and unpleasant, but I can turn it off, right?

Wrong. I look for the easy 'click here to opt out of this feature' button, and there isn't one; I google 'turn off autocomplete' and find this answer (from "Kelly, a Google employee"): "it's in keeping with our vision of a unified Google search experience to make popular, useful features part of the default experience, rather than maintain different versions of Google. As Autocomplete quality has improved, we felt it was appropriate to have it always on for all of our users."

What can I say? So I'm trying alternative search engines. Currently using Bing, recommendations gratefully received.