Google is Tweaking Chrome's Search Bar To Make It Easier To Navigate the Web

Google is making a few changes to the way its search and address bar -- known as the omnibox -- works in the Chrome browser. The changes are individually pretty small, but there's an important and somewhat unexpected trend in them all: Google is making it easier for you to move around the web without having to do so many Google searches. From a report: If you're in Chrome on desktop or mobile, the browser will now try and correct your URL typos, so when you type thevrege.com or ninteendo.com, you'll get autocomplete suggestions based on the right site and not whatever is behind those misspelled domains. The omnibox's autocomplete will now be smarter in general, predicting the site you're looking for based on keywords rather than just guessing what URL you're typing. Chrome can also now search within your bookmarks for sites and files related to what you're typing.

All those features are based on your own browsing history and bookmarks, so it's just Chrome becoming slightly more personalized. But the last change is web-wide and is pretty off-brand for Google: when you start to type in the name of a popular website, the omnibox will show that site's URL in the list of suggestions, and you can select it to go right to that site. (You might have seen this one already: it's been rolling out for a couple of weeks and should be live to everyone now.)

Let me do that for you

[gx5000]

Right, I just can't see how that could be exploited in the wild, wait...I'll be turning this off.
36 years in this bizz and I've almost shaken my head off at some of these "Features"
Hey Google, are you tracking my site visits harder now?

Re:Let me do that for you

[ls671]

I own ninteendo.com which is a site for teens playing Nintendo. I also own a few satire sites with similar names. I am going to sue google for the lost of revenue. Who do you think they are to hijack my legitimate traffic? There are limits to everything,

Re:

[Tony Isaac]

You might want to tread lightly, Nintendo could get nasty and sue you for typosquatting.

Re:

[MancunianMaskMan]

whaddoyoumean, ninteendo.com isn't a pr0n site?

Re:

[swillden]

Hey Google, are you tracking my site visits harder now?

They already get every keypress in the omnibox (unless you turn off suggestions), how would this enable more?

Hey! let me fix that for you.

[oldgraybeard]

Google is Tweaking Chrome's Search Bar To Make It Easier To "track you on" the Web.

Re:Hey! let me fix that for you.

[93 Escort Wagon]

Is it also "helpfully" doing a transparent redirect from the URL I actually type to some Google AMP equivalent?

Re:Hey! let me fix that for you.

[swillden]

Google is Tweaking Chrome's Search Bar To Make It Easier To "track you on" the Web.

Chrome already queries Google on every keypress in the omnibox (that's where those search suggestions come from). And if you actually typo the URL and hit enter, that full text goes to the Google search engine, which helpfully suggests the thing you really wanted, and Google gets a query when you click that.

So... there's really no room for additional tracking. If anything, this will track you a little less, because if Chrome augments the suggestion list it gets from the server with locally-computed results, and you click one of those, there's no need for Chrome to send anything to Google. It could, I suppose. You can probably check the new implementation in the Chromium source to find out if it does. But even if it did (which I doubt, actually), that would just constitute the same level of tracking, not an increased level.

Re:

[usedtobestine]

This is why you should always begin typing into any google search bar with an obscenity, they still collect keypresses, but they don't send anything back to waste your time.

Re:

[Tony Isaac]

I don't get your point. What new information does Google get from you as a result of these changes?

Le me just try it

[Alumoi]

Soooo, click on url bar, start typying... firefo...
I'm sorry, Dave, I'm afraid I can't do that.

Is this client side or cloud side?

[Fly Swatter]

Because auto completing or correcting the omnibox from the history and bookmarks located on my local computer is one thing, but the other is arguably data collection by google and a security risk to me. Google should not be getting anything I may type into that box until I press enter, and even then only if it not a valid URL format, maybe not even then.

So how to turn off this new google analytics data collection feature?

Re:

[GlennC]

So how to turn off this new google analytics data collection feature?

Granted you're only going to trade one data collector for another but here you go: http://www.mozilla.org/firefox/ [mozilla.org]

Re:

[SouthSeb]

If I understand it correctly, in order to present suggestions as you type, Google already collects every keystroke you make in the omnibox.

How about devoptions like toggle automatic search?

[youn]

_ as a dev, many times I'll type in localhost or my-dev-host-that-is-in-etc-hosts-and-resolves-perfectly.localdomain and unless things ends with a slash, it goes to search.
_ can they provide an option to stop obfuscating http / https ... and make it easier to edit urls?
_ can they make it less annoying when I access my own dev host https and provide a button that says I know wtf I am doing? I get why they are doing that but should make it easier for devs too
_ now that google + is gone, maybe they can reintro

Re:

[Paxtez]

_ now that google + is gone, maybe they can reintroduce the + as a required term ... It's really anno

I didn't know that was a thing. I've always used quotes for required. foo "bar" will only return results that contain "bar" somewhere.

Re:

[jenningsthecat]

_ now that google + is gone, maybe they can reintroduce the + as a required term ... It's really anno

I didn't know that was a thing. I've always used quotes for required. foo "bar" will only return results that contain "bar" somewhere.

Google is starting to ignore a lot of search modifiers; but historically speaking, the purpose of putting double quotes around a word or phrase was to ensure that the results include exactly that term. Without quotes, the search may contain what Google thinks are synonymous or otherwise equivalent words or phrases.

Your understanding of how double quotes work applies to DDG - it's one of several things I find annoying about that SE. In Google, when you want a specific word, it should be preceded by "allintex

Re:

[SandorZoo]

It seems that a lot of people aren't familiar with some of the useful search modifiers available in Google. For example, you could add a "site:slashdot.com" to limit your search to the specified URL. Haven't needed this in a while so I can't confirm that it still works, but it used to.

It does. There is always https://www.google.com/advance... [google.com] for thoese people that don't know the search modifiers .

New phising technique.

[xack]

Register a typo squatted domain. Use a botnet to make the url popular, then get Google to "correct" the users url to the typo domain. Also urls that use different tlds ie the old whitehouse.com/gov confusion.

Since we are the product...

[newbie_fantod]

...consider it a small pay-raise :-)

Will it be able to stop?

[jddj]

What about when I want Axure and not Azure? Will it suck as fantastically as all my spell checkers do?

Google Antitrust Lawsuit

[Required Snark]

This is a perfect example of why it is long overdue.

It's supposed to be the World Wide Web, not the Google Web.

because walled gardens worked so well before

[dhizzle]

They should carpet bomb mailboxes with coasters/ Google software CDs. Apparently that once worked. In some ways the change isn't offensive. The Chrome users are already all-in on a Google ecosystem. Much like menthol in chewing tobacco or cigarettes, it doesn't really affect me. Sheeple gonna sheep.