hello, if you are visiting google.com manually & do a search, those settings won't work. this is an issue of google not remembering your search settings, as a workaround you could create a bookmark for https://www.google.com/search?hl=en&complete=0&site=webhp&q= and always use that when going to google and conducting a search.

(turning off suggestions in the dedicated search bar in firefox will only have an effect there, and the keyword.url setting only has an effect when entering a search term in the firefox location bar)

Thanks again for your help. In Chrome I was able to 'create' a search provider from a similar URL, and select that as my default search provider. Can this be done in Firefox?

In Chrome, selecting such a URL as default search provider effectively kills search suggestions in Chrome's version of the Awesome Bar (they call it their Omnibox) and also in Google search boxes. The only exception being that Chrome will continue to suggest search terms from your history and bookmarks, but nothing else. Of course, if I go directly to google.com and search from there, search suggestions appear.

hello, i think i'm still not entirely sure to which search suggestions you are referring to - because the screenshot, that you've attached on your earlier question is showing the suggestions on the google page & not the firefox awesomebar...

Problem solved at last by choosing "When Firefox starts: Show a blank page" and setting my Home Page to about:blank.

When Firefox starts or when I go to my Home Page or when I open a new tab, I enter my search term in the Awesome Bar. (No other place to enter it.) The search opens to the following URI:

https://www.google.com/search?hl=en&complete=0&site=webhp&q=[search term]

Now I can type a new search term into Google's own search box with no search suggestions. The resulting URL is:

https://www.google.com/search?hl=en&complete=0&site=webhp&q=[new search term]&[long string of code]

Of course, this means I need to forgo FF 13's fancy new Home Page, but I can live with that.

I should add that this is not a Firefox problem per se. It's really about how to outwit Google.

Here's what helped for me:

Tools -> Options -> Privacy -> Location Bar (at the bottom).

It asks "When using the location bar, suggest:"

And I chose "nothing" from the drop-down.