Remove Ads from Google Search and Gmail

To start with, text only ads from Google were an innovative idea. Unlike most other ads the text ads were seen as harmless and were welcome by most of us. With continued use of Google’s services, these ads tend to draw attention and are starting to get annoying. Well, why would you want to spare your screen space for something that’s not useful to you anyway?

Here is a simple trick to hide ads from Google Search including ads in Gmail. The trick works in Firefox and uses Greasemonkey to manipulate pages displayed by Google.

Let’s start with installing Greasemonkey for Firefox. Greasemonkey is a popular Firefox extension that allows you to write scripts that alter the way web pages are displayed, it’s available for free from here: https://addons.mozilla.org/firefox/748/.
You would need to restart Firefox after installation, so ensure that you don’t loose track of the information on this page.

Next, browse to http://userstyles.org/style/show/353 and click on “Load as user script” button to install the Greasemonkey script. Now open Google Search or Gmail – ads are gone.

A word of caution, with this hack we are only hiding the ads from being displayed. They are actually still there, just that they are not visible. It is also worth noting that as this hack is based upon manipulating existing html structure, it is very possible that this hack might break as Google Search or Gmail continues to evolve.