Forget Everything Else: Exclude Browsing History When Searching via Chrome’s Omnibox

As you may already know, in the Google Chrome web browser, the address bar and search bar is combined into an all-in-one area called the Omnibox.

When you perform a search via the Omnibox, Chrome will display suggestions from Google’s top results as well as your personal bookmarks, your browsing history and previous typed URLs.

Your results will look similar to this before using this trick.

So, what would you do if for whatever reason you did not want all of that extra information to display when performing a search in the Omnibox? Meaning, you only want to see Google’s top suggestions displayed. Well, you’d use this quick little trick.

Type a question mark in the Omnibox and then begin to type your search query (ie. ?technology). Now, you should only see web search suggestions displayed, minus your browsing history and everything else.

When using a ? before your search query, only web search suggestions will be displayed.

As an added bonus and an additional way to protect your privacy, if you use the question mark trick in Incognito mode, Chrome will only show suggestions from your search history.

via Google Operating System

Subscribe to our newsletter!

Our latest tutorials delivered straight to your inbox

Charnita Fance Avatar

Read next

Suzanne Simard sealed paper birch and Douglas fir seedlings inside plastic bags, fed them carbon-14 and carbon-13 dioxide, and nine days later found carbon had crossed between species through fungal threads in the British Columbia soil beneath her boots
A species of jellyfish called Turritopsis dohrnii can revert its adult cells back to a juvenile polyp stage when injured or starving, effectively restarting its life cycle, and biologists have so far failed to identify any natural limit to how many times it can do this.
A Japanese man named Jiroemon Kimura, who lived to 116, was born in 1897 when Queen Victoria still ruled and died in 2013, meaning a single human life personally overlapped with the invention of the airplane, the atomic bomb, the internet, and Instagram
The Hollywood sign originally read HOLLYWOODLAND when it was built in 1923 as a real estate advertisement for a housing development, and it was only meant to stand for 18 months, but nobody ever got around to taking it down and the city eventually adopted it as a landmark
Almost all of the world’s internet traffic does not travel by satellite but through fibre-optic cables lying on the ocean floor, a hidden web of wires crossing the deepest parts of the sea to connect the continents.
People who flip their phone face down on every table aren’t being secretive. They figured out that staying interruptible meant handing their time to whoever rang first
Twitch vs. Facebook Gaming vs. YouTube Gaming: What’s the Best Live Game Streaming Platform?
Chrome Extensions Ownership Transfer is a Direct Threat to You: How to Stay Safe