I have pretty much the opposite anecdote: to me the Chrome URL bar is a magic component that finds any of the tickets I've lately worked on (from three different ticketing systems) with typing a few words/characters, knows that "n" is HN etc, "g" takes me to gmail.com etc. And all without any effort to manually teach it.

Google Spreadsheets is where it often fails to work perfectly - hard to get it to take me to the spreadsheets homepage if I don't remember exactly which sheet I want to open.

Honestly, this has been the most annoying part of agency work for me. Every three months I work in a different github repo, so I constantly need to forcefully make it relearn what gi+down-arrow means

I think one problem with the Chrome URL bar it's that it won't show rarely visited sites, so you have to go to history instead.

Try to get it to learn yc = news.ycombinator.com took a fair amount of jimmying to get it to learn it after a browser user switch.