Turning off autocomplete in the Safari Search bar

Thanks @DocileMeerkat.

The only one of those settings that was not already turned off was Quick Website Search, so I turned this off, and power cycled the iPad.

I am afraid it didn’t make any difference; the issue still occurs exactly as described as above 😢

Thanks @LotusPilot

I had done this before, but I tried it again, with the usual power cycle.

When I was able to get back on to the Community (at least proving that it made some difference!), I could see that the behaviour I am trying to prevent is still occurring.

Every letter of the alphabet individually brings up something except for x y and z, as do the numbers 1 and 9.

And while the text in blue is from the referenced website in each case for me, how does that explain that everything my wife typed in - the names of ports in South Africa - brought up our village name, plus GB, in every case?

It’s possible that this was a separate issue, of course, with that string stuck in the iPad’s cache, or whatever, as we do seem to have got past that by now; but I’m still getting a Safari autocomplete that i would like to be able to prevent.

And as far as I know, we have now turned off everything configurable that could have a bearing on this.

Unless there are any other suggestions out there.....

We have at least found a workaround for Safari, which is to type a space after our intended search string, but this shouldn’t be necessary.

@LotusPilot

I think you are right about the poisoning, cache but not DNS, but I don’t think it’s sinister. I think Safari was asking for the blue bit based on the black bit, but because there was no address for a website that Safari knew of for the search terms being entered, it just took something that was cached - as the name of our village plus GB certainly would have been - and displayed that. And this, or maybe even the same cache entry ‘sticking’ determined what the response was.

We did manage to break the behaviour, and ‘unstick’ the cache, or whatever it was, and haven’t seen it since, nor managed to reproduce it.

So maybe it doesn’t matter so much that Safari does what it does in the autocomplete area, when that is working properly. But it seems to be something that Safari ‘just does’ as part of its non-configurable coding, because I’ve had every setting in Safari turned off except the Advanced/Experimental ones, and it still does it, even JavaScript, though I had to turn that back on when websites kept telling me they wouldn’t work without it. 

And I tried the Network reset you suggested, which seemed quite an extensive thing, with black screens and progress bars and whatnot, but didn’t seem to do anything tangible except make me need to reinput my network password - it certainly didn’t change the search window behaviour.

But this will be worth doing on my wife’s iPad I think, if it flushes that sticky cache, though it didn’t seem to flush anything on mine.