from Hacker News

When using the address bar in Chrome, ads appear in autocomplete

by acadien on 7/23/20, 6:55 PM with 2 comments

Just today I noticed when searching about "building <something>" upon typing in "bu" 'burger king' showed up in autocomplete. Has nothing to do with my search history, this happens on any google account from what I can tell?

https://imgur.com/a/t4mLBEt

Ads in search results, ads in maps, ads in email, ads in autocomplete.

  • by matchbok on 7/23/20, 7:12 PM

    Set your search engine query to: http://www.google.com/search?q=%s

    A new chrome update changed it to a new one that has spammy stuff in it.

  • by greenyoda on 7/23/20, 7:07 PM

    This doesn't seem to be a function of Chrome, but of your default search engine. If I set my search engine to Google, I get the same results as you did. But if I set it back to DuckDuckGo, I get:

    Buzzfeed / Burger King / Buy Buy Baby / ...

    ...without the icons.

    If I just type "b" with DuckDuckGo set as Chrome's search engine, the top result is "bing", which I can't imagine is something that Google wants me to see.

    So it seems that Chrome is just returning the top few results returned by whatever search engine you've configured.