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Google Chrome address bar (or omnibox as they call it) is quite annoying for me. I don't want to use it for web search. If I type kitten in the address bar I want my browser to connect to the kitten host or give me an error if it does not exist. Completion suggestions (aka. recommendations) according to browser history are fine.

Expectation:

  • The kitten host exists => Go to http://kitten/ or https://kitten/ or give error that both :80 and :443 are ignoring or rejecting connection.
  • The kitten host does not exist => Error page: Host not found

Reality:

  • The kitten host exists => Search results for kitten appear.
  • The kitten host does not exist => Search results for kitten appear.

I have a /etc/hosts (or Windows equivalent) file with one word entries in it. I want to use them from my Chrome browser, because I am forced to use Chrome for whatever reason. The same setting in Firefox for is to set keyword.enable=false in about:config.

So the question is: can I disable web search from Google Chrome address bar?

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  • Bingleducking gave me several pages that purport to instruct you in disabling this.
    – Jeff Zeitlin
    Mar 8, 2022 at 14:16
  • alternatively you can make them actual domains, such as kitten.com, then it will work.
    – LPChip
    Mar 8, 2022 at 15:39

2 Answers 2

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A very easy workaround is to add a / to the end of the hostname. That way Google Chrome will not try to use it as a search term, it will treat it like a host name exclusively.

Result of mistypedhostname/ (Hungarian)

Result of mistypedhostname/ (Hungarian)

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Additional information: Address bar as web search is an incredible information leak! You mistype something (maybe even with passwords in it) and all the address bar contents will be leaked to the outside world! Terrible!

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