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On multiple occassions yesterday, I visited a website that had a word startlocal in it's title. Today, when I entered startlocal in the omnibox, I expected that website as a suggestion. Instead, I got google search term suggestions.

How can I make Chrome attach higher priority to the results from my history, when determining what to show in omnibox?

pulsarjune
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srgb
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4 Answers4

8

It looks like the option is now called "Auto-complete searches and URLs", and it is available through chrome://settings/syncSetup.

l0b0
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    For year >= 2022, this is the way to go. – LondonRob Jun 08 '22 at 13:57
  • I think this is now called "Improve search suggestions". – Alex Palmer Aug 18 '23 at 08:33
  • It still shows old search terms when disabled, which is kind of annoying! You can remove individual entries by highlighting the entry and then pressing Shift+Delete (all OSs, full keyboard) or Fn+Shift+⌫ (macOS small keyboard). See: https://superuser.com/a/189334/713733 – Alex Palmer Aug 18 '23 at 08:40
4

As Michaël suggested, you can use chrome's history as a search engine.

  1. Click on the customization and options button (aka hamburger menu)
  2. Click on the "Settings" menu
  3. Scroll down to "Search engine" and click on "Manage Search Engines"
  4. Click on "Add" and fill the form:
    • Search engine: "Google Chrome"
    • Keyword: "history"
    • URL with %s in place of query: "chrome://history/?#q=%s"
  5. Set that new search engine as default by clicking on the 3 dots on the right of it and selecting "Make default"

Note though that this URL will prevent chrome from searching new things. You will be able to search for things you already looked for, but entering something new will search in your history instead of google's search engine.

This feature is most useful when you want a customized search for other websites: type de Keyword: then hit TAB to search on that engine instead of your default one.

Sirmyself
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I found a better solution that keeps the searching capabilities of the Omnibox:

  • Open chrome's flag page and search for #omnibox-drive-suggestions or just copy-paste this URL : chrome://flags/#omnibox-drive-suggestions
  • Disable the option and restart Chrome.

You should be good to go!

Sirmyself
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    This solution doesn't work – ACV Apr 27 '20 at 20:42
  • @acv I just tested on chrome 81.0.4044.129 and it still works. – Sirmyself Apr 28 '20 at 19:21
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    This did not work for me unless I disable autocomplete. `Auto-complete searches and URLs Sends some cookies and searches from the address bar and search box to your default search engine`. Before disabling this, it was still showing me 5 search offers before showing history and finally the bookmark – ACV Apr 28 '20 at 22:26
  • still shows me old researches, but the actual URLs are shown first – Sirmyself Apr 29 '20 at 02:00
  • This isn’t a flag anymore. Looks like https://superuser.com/a/1707634 is the way. – binki Mar 14 '22 at 15:03
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I'm not sure if you can do that exactly, at least I couldn't find a way, but there is this extension called History Search that simplifies searching within history a bit, letting you perform searches on history in omnibox using "h" as a keyword (like with search engines).

revamp
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    I believe this does not require the History Search extension; just create a new search engine with URL "chrome://history/?#q=%s". – Michaël Apr 24 '17 at 17:28