Most of Magento's pages have either two or three columns, with the right column containing information such as the shopping cart contents and a product comparison block. We will be removing one of these; the technique shown can be used for removing most unwanted blocks from the frontend of your store.
Turning on Template Path Hints and block names: As mentioned we'll pick removing the "product compare" block from the right column of Magento for our example:
To find out where to look we have to know what kind of block we are dealing with. Template Path Hints can be turned on for that purpose, with the additional option to display "block names". In the following screenshot you can see how the frontend of your store will look after activating these:
Finding the block and layout update file to edit: As you can see in the screenshot, the compare block is of type
catalog/product_compare_sidebar. The first bit,catalog, is what we are interested...
