I dislike how Chrome has turned the address bar (also known as a “location bar” or “URL bar”) into an “Omnibox”. Since I run Chrome on my Linux box, and I have a bunch of test hosts defined in my /etc/hosts file, everytime I try to shortcut by just typing a dev hostname, Google pops up a damn search result!
There are some posted methods to avoid this. One was to check chrome://flags, which does have a bunch of nice settings, however my version of Chrome DID NOT have the one to do this!
Instead I found that creating my own search engine option was the solution. Go to chrome://settings/ and choose “Manage Search Engines”. In there, add a new one with “none”, “null” and “http://%s” as the options.
Boom! No more annoying forced search! Suck it, Omnibox!
OK, deep breath.