Hester - 10:02 am on Aug 27, 2008 (gmt 0)

Not seen on the UK home page of Google yet, so I tried the US page. I see there's a CLOSE link at the bottom of the drop-down menu. Just click on that to turn off the feature for the current search.

I think they could also be doing this to show off the large numbers listed in the drop-down results. "Beat those Microsoft and Yahoo!" Now the competition will be to display inflated hits next to each search by various misleading methods.