Internet Explorer 8, included with Windows 7, contains a feature called Suggested Sites that may or may not be of interest to you. When enabled, Suggested Sites will transmit your browser history to Microsoft in order to generate a list of sites with comparable content that you may also enjoy. There are all sorts of privacy questions regarding shipping your history to Microsoft but in theory it’s relatively harmless. Nevertheless, if you don’t desire the Suggested Sites feature it’s pretty simple to disable it completely.

Stepping back, Suggested Sites is psuedo-disabled by default. Recall the first time you used Internet Explorer – it ran a setup wizard where it asked you a few questions: what search engine to use, did you want web accelerators, or enable Suggested Sites, etc. If you’ve since changed your mind or otherwise did not understand what you were enabling, here’s how to eradicate the feature.

Within Internet Explorer navigate to Tools->Internet Options in the upper right-hand corner.

Select the Advanced tab and locate Enable Suggested Sites under the Browsing header. Un-check it.

Returning to your browser window you will now see that Suggested Sites have been turned off.

The last step is to simply remove the button altogether as it serves little purpose! Right-click on the Suggested Sites button and choose Delete.

Pretty simple all and all!