5

There is a website I used to use a lot associated with a previous hobby I'm trying to remove from my life (I played a specific addictive video game a lot and I'm in the process of quitting it.)

I've been trying to get chrome to stop suggesting this website when I start typing a url that starts with the same letter, but no matter how many X's I click to remove individual paths from the autocomplete suggest, there's still hundreds and hundreds more from all the subpages of that site that I've ever visited.

Is there a way to blanket remove an entire set of urls by hostname from your autocomplete rather than clicking X on the dropdown one by one hundreds of times?

temporary_user_name
  • 875

4 Answers4

3

This has multiple things you have to do in order not to get a valid suggestion.

What you need to do is:

  1. Turn off the autocomplete with trending searches:

    • Go to https://www.google.com. Tap "Settings" →
    • "Search settings" →
    • "Other settings" →
    • toggle off "Autocomplete with trending searches."

  2. Turn off the personal search results:

    • If you're logged into a Google account, tap "Settings" →
    • "Search settings" →
    • "Personal results" →
    • toggle off "Show personal results".

  3. Delete the suggested path you have already been to (this has to be done manually, I did not find yet a way to do it automatically):

    • Hover over an individual suggestion and click "X" to remove it or you can press shift + del
    • On mobile, swipe left, and tap "Delete."

Or you can use some addon like clickclean, where you have gui and select it as you want.

Giacomo1968
  • 58,727
tukan
  • 2,325
2

Clearing away hundreds of autocomplete suggestions will take some work.

If you don't need your past autocompletes and are willing to start from scratch with a clean list, it would be simpler to delete your browsing history in chrome://settings/clearBrowserData and start afresh.

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harrymc
  • 498,455
2

Chrome's browsing history is stored in a little sqlite database named History. You can edit it by running SQL scripts: https://superuser.com/a/1047641/673426

More details about the database and history files here: https://www.sans.org/blog/google-chrome-forensics/

Chrome warns you may also need to clear your Google search activity separately, since it's synced to your google account. You can do this here - it allows searching by text, but you still have to click one by one (or delete all):

https://myactivity.google.com/product/search

Cpt.Whale
  • 10,914
0

If you're OK deleting your browsing history, that'd be the easiest way: https://support.google.com/chrome/answer/95589?hl=en&co=GENIE.Platform%3DDesktop You MAY be able to delete just that sites history:

  1. 3-dots menu, History, History; a separate tab opens
  2. Click By group tab, click 3-dots to right of the website you want gone, 'Remove all from history'
  3. History page (chrome://history) top-right has a search, search site, check box next to all sites you want gone, click Delete in top-right

You may also need to turn off various 'Suggestion'/Autocomplete settings. These were covered in tukan's answer, but here is one of the official help articles on it. https://support.google.com/websearch/answer/106230?hl=en&co=GENIE.Platform%3DDesktop&oco=0 https://www.wikihow.com/Remove-Suggestions-on-Chrome

Delete a single sites cookies/cache/data from Chrome (which may not help the autocomplete/fill/suggestions):

  1. Go to the website
  2. Click padlock symbol to left of URL address
  3. Cookies and site data
  4. Manage cookies and site data
  5. Click the padlock on each related site you see in this list

May also help: go to site, padlock, Site settings, Delete data in new tab (URL will be chrome://settings/content/siteDetails?site=https....)

gregg
  • 6,307