Chrome's autocomplete for searches is often very annoying and intrusive because it is opt-out. It autocompletes by default and you have to press Backspace to dismiss it. Google search suggestions are welcome but sometimes I just want to type what I want.
There's an option for "Use a prediction service to help complete searches and URLs typed in the address bar" but this disables suggestions also. Is there any way to disable autocomplete without losing suggestions?
It can never be fully disabled, unfortunately. You can clear your browser history (including all new history being cleared on session exit every time) and follow the below steps to get close to the desired results.
In current version:
(This used to be under Privacy and Security)
In older versions of Chrome:
Keep in mind that the address bar shows matches from your browsing history, in addition to predictions. If you don't want to see matches from your browsing history, you must clear that as well.
Beyond that there is nothing more you can do. It is either all or nothing. You cannot modify the behavior of how you dismiss suggestions. Suggestions and autocomplete are the same service.
My biggest complaint is that I type a hostname into the address bar (just a host name, not and FQDN) and Google Chrome goes off and searches for the hostname instead of going to it. And now it is surrounded by a bunch of URL so I hate to type it again!! Grrr!!!!
I found something that seems to completely disable searches in the address bar in Google Chrome.
Settings
Now, when you want to search in the address bar, you can, by typing the "Keyword" for the search you want and then your search terms.
BUT :-) just typing into the google.com web page search will Not take you to the address bar!
I'd just wanted to indicate that I did a bit of trial and test and I found one option that works well for just typing things in the address bar, and not going to the first search result.
It's pretty simple: control-enter instead of just enter will input just the typed text instead of the first suggestion. Note that if the server name is not complete it will try to e.g. add .com to it so it is not perfect. But for going to local addresses it will suffice (instead of going to the suggested 192.168.I78.X - note the I instead of the 1 - which I probably searched for by mistyping or something similar).
Tested on Chrome version 90.0.4430.212 (64 bit Windows).
For me there are two different things to do. The first one has been already marked as the correct answer. In brief:
However I still see, in addition to sites saved as bookmarks, URLs that I frequently visit. So the second thing to do to remove those entries is to:
To eliminate random suggestions from the web when typing in the address bar...
Paste into 'Search settings': Autocomplete searches and URLs
Find and disable this option.
Chrome version: 100.0.x.x
A crude workaround to avoid accidentally using an autocompleted URL or search query when pressing Enter, is to instead use the keystrokes SpaceBackspaceEnter.
This works because the Space eliminates most autocomplete suffixes, and then the Backspace either:
One small caveat is that trailing spaces are trimmed by Chrome for URLs, but not for search queries. So, there could be an unintended trailing space (encoded as '+') in the resulting search URL - but this is generally harmless.
By the way, it makes me deeply unhappy when I try to Backspace a typo, and nothing happens because an autocomplete popped up milliseconds earlier. It's therapeutic to share these experiences.
