Home Forums Networks & Cross-Platform Networking iGoogle – How to disable?

I long since thought I had dumped/disabled iGoogle (aka Google Instant) as a search engine, but apparently it's now a default, although not announced as such.
Consequently all my previously selected Google Search Settings have been disabled (eg, number of items shown per page is restricted to 10, with no choice to increase).
(Aside: This seems to have happened in the same time frame as my having eliminated Web History from all my Google accounts. Coincidence?)
I can find no way to eliminate the problem.
Any helpful hints?

It appears that you now have to do a search in order to access Google preferences—when the search results appear, so does the gear-badged "Options" button, the clicking of which gives you a menu which includes a Preferences link.

Merci. I figured that out previously.
But not to put too fine a point on it, I'm [choose one (or more)]:
(a) stupid
(b) oblivious
(c) unobservant
Three times I read the Search Settings page and missed the line/choice which reads "Never use Instant results" under Google Instant Predictions.
As soon as I realized that, I changed my preference, and all reverted to the way I wanted it. (Of course, that doesn't answer why my settings were changed somewhere along the line by Google.)

I've long since given up trying to understand why Google settings change. It appears to be related to the season, the tides, the phase of the moon, the amount of time that's passed since the last Clint Eastwood movie was shown on network television, the price of wheat futures on the commodities market, the total net worth of Paris Hilton, or some combination of all of the above.

I have found that when I clean out my cookies, all settings for igoogle are lost

That's probably it, since I frequently dump all my Google cookies and start fresh.
However, I thought the Search Settings were set in the account on Google's server(s), much as Gmail settings are (and which don't revert to default when I kill their cookies). {sigh}

You can't see individual cookies in Safari's "Privacy" pane, but you can with a cookie manager such as Safari Cookies, which I use.

When I clear my Google cookies I get rid of all of them other than the one named "PREF," which stores my search prefs.

I get that "Options" whatchamacallit at google.com as well as on search pages.

I just noticed that search pages now display my "SafeSearch" setting, i.e. "off."