TL;DR
- Download an URL blocker extension for your browser (i used URL Blocker on Google Chrome) that supports URL in regexp format.
- Put these two URLs in the URL blocker extension:
http[s]?:\/\/.*[\.]?google\..*\/gen_204.*
http[s]?:\/\/.*[\.]?google\..*\/complete/search.*
- Enjoy a silent search engine
The story so far
Yeah, ok, my english is really shitty but the title is right. Actually is not possible to disable the search suggestions on Google (not chrome, i mean Google the search engine) without disabling search history. The fact is that i find very useful when Google use my data to make some things easy for me. For instance, every morning it tells me when the bus will arrive to the stop because, based on my habits, it knows that in the morning i go to work with the public transports. So i don’t want to disable the activities, but i have a YouTube channel where i put tutorials (by the way, this is the URL: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCJ8C0FZAvCc260u-LYJX6wA but unfortunately it’s in italian) and i don’t want that Google, in a middle of a video, shows my searches history so i had to find a way to avoid this.
Maybe there are some smarter ways but this works pretty well.
The analysis
So i thought: “Ok, but when i interact with the search box it have to query the Google systems to retrieve my history; what if i would block this requests?” so i opened the developer tools on Google Chrome and switched on network tab, then i tried to digit something in the search box. As soon as i clicked in the box, something happened:
So i wrote the address https://www.google.it/gen_204 on my text editor and tried to write something. So i saw that another URL is called:
So another URL is called for autocompletion and it’s this: https://www.google.it/complete/search. Ok the thing is pretty simple: i have to block these two urls but how?
I searched a little bit on the Google Chrome extensions store and the first extension that i found is URL Blocker but i suppose that there are other extensions, maybe also more performing but i must admit that this extension is made very well.
So now i have to block these two URLs, fortunately URL Blocker supports regexp so, with the help of the saint https://regex101.com/ i tried something like this:
http[s]?:\/\/.*[\.]?google\..*\/gen_204.*
http[s]?:\/\/.*[\.]?google\..*\/complete/search.*
Ok i sucks pretty bad at regexp, if you are able to find some more performing and well done regexp write it on comments.
Added these two regexp to URL Blocker i tried again to make a search:
Now it seems to be silent with suggestions.
I hope that this guide will be useful to you, waiting for Google to make up its mind and introduce the option to silent the search suggestions.
Thanks and bye!
