Make Google Chrome's address bar prefer page titles to domain names when offering completions?

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I've recently switched from Firefox to Chrome, and the thing I miss most from Firefox is the "Awesome Bar" that suggests completions for what I type primarily based on page titles, and then secondarily based on domain names.

Chrome offers both matching URLs and titles, just like like Firefox, but Chrome seems to always prefer a matching domain name over a matching page title or a match to another part of the URL (besides the domain), no matter how many times I pass over the former for the latter.

In fact, Chrome also prefers to suggest a search rather than matching anything other than a domain name.

So is there any hidden preference I can change to tell Chrome that I care more about page titles than domain names?

Example: I want to go to Google Reader, so I press Control+L and begin typing "reader". The URL for google reader is http://www.google.com/reader/view/#overview-page, so the domain name is www.google.com, which does not contain the word "reader". So the first option that Chrome suggests is either another site that has "reader" as part of the domain, or a search for "reader" with the default search engine. No matter how many times I scroll down and select Google Reader, Chrome never "learns" that that's what I want.

Ryan C. Thompson

Posted 2010-12-12T02:37:20.077

Reputation: 10 085

A workaround, adding Chrome history as a search engine - https://superuser.com/a/160649/100311. Works good

– onlinenaman – 2018-11-25T07:46:41.710

could you update with a specific example? It'd help me understand – Jeff Atwood – 2010-12-12T07:36:53.993

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Excuse me for saying that, but http://reader.google.com would take you to Google Reader by typing "reader" (or, "r", that is). This applies to many domains, and I have become used to it when switching from firefox.

– slhck – 2010-12-13T14:04:51.213

Hmm. reader.google.com redirects to google.com/reader. I guess that's a fix for this specific case, but I would still like a general fix. – Ryan C. Thompson – 2010-12-13T18:26:57.563

I recently switched to Chrome and this is what I am missing a lot. Its actually a very significant loss of productivity that I cannot go to a URL by typing a string from the title. I couldn't find any addons to do this too. – Stewie – 2013-10-01T14:56:12.133

Answers

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There's no explicit way to do this in Chrome. At some point I did notice a menu in about:flags that allowed you to configure the behavior of instant (if you use instant from your omnibar) to act a little differently, but that seems to have gone away in more recent updates (I use the developer release on OS X).

user60681

Posted 2010-12-12T02:37:20.077

Reputation:

0

Guess your best bet is to try their discussion forums or get someone to change the source code.

There is no configuration setting or extension that has access to what you are trying to do...

Tamara Wijsman

Posted 2010-12-12T02:37:20.077

Reputation: 54 163

Asked: 2010-12-12T02:37:20.077

Viewed: 1 992 times

Active: 2010-12-28T21:37:56.797