Google recently made a change to Chrome for Android which now shows your past searches along with frequently visited sites on the browser’s new tab page.
While this feature has apparently been in testing for the past few months, it’s now being rolled out to all the best Android phones to the chagrin of many Android users — myself included.
When you open a new tab page in Chrome for Android, you usually see a Google search bar with a list of your most visited sites below it. This can be really useful because all the sites you use most are right there when you open a new tab which means you don’t have to go to your bookmarks.
However, with the introduction of this new feature, along with the site’s favicons, magnifying glass icons with the text of previous searches you’ve searched for now appear in this list as well. While this may be useful to some, I found that my previous search queries from days and even weeks ago appeared on Chrome’s new tab page on my Android smartphone.
While I thought of ditching Chrome altogether and trying one of the best Android browsers instead, there is a fix you can apply right now. If you’re as annoyed by this change as I am, it’s definitely worth doing and only takes a few minutes.
How to turn off search results in Chrome new tabs
When Google makes a change to Chrome that you don’t like or even if there’s a new feature in the works you want to try, Chrome flags It can help you disable or enable it.
As he discovered it 9To5Google (Opens in a new tab)This annoying feature is referred to as “Repeatable Organic Queries in Most Visited Tiles” on Chrome’s flags page. While we’ll disable this feature in Chrome for Android, you can see all the different “experiments” currently available from the Chrome team at Google by heading to chrome://flags in your mobile or desktop browser.
To head straight to this feature in Chrome flags, enter “chrome:flags/#organic-reperies-queries” into your browser’s address bar. By default, it will be enabled. However, only Click on Enabled A dropdown list will appear. Go down and Click Disabled to turn it off.
Unfortunately at the moment there is no way to customize Chrome’s New Tab page from within the browser, but this fix will remove previous search queries from appearing when you open a new tab or click on the address bar in Chrome for Android. It’s also worth noting that you can long-click frequently visited sites that appear on the new tab page to remove them completely.
