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

Posted by acadien on Thursday July 23, 2020 @02:55PM
from the self-post dept.

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.

( 2 comments | 2 points | on HN )

Re:When using the address bar in Chrome, ads appear in autoc... by matchbok on Thursday July 23, 2020 @03:12PM (#23931095)

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.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:When using the address bar in Chrome, ads appear in autoc... by greenyoda on Thursday July 23, 2020 @03:07PM (#23931033)

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.

[ Parent | on HN ]