Google Chrome is making its Omnibox Autocompletion more efficient than ever before

Google is working on an experiment these days to autocomplete suggestions in the search address bar in Chrome with any part of the title as input. Currently, when you type the hotspot prefix of the title, only that gets autocompleted. If your input is from any other part in the title, autocompletion does not occur. So, it means that only the prefix of the URL is autocompleted at the moment.

Now, this is what Google is trying to improve with the Omnibox, i.e. the search plus address bar in the Chrome browser. This Omnibox shows rich entity suggestions, answers your questions, and can also be used as a calculator.

It not only allows us to look up for various things on the web, but it also lets us visit websites when we type the prefix of the URL we are trying to go to. As mentioned above, the functionality of auto-completion of this URL input is limited at the moment, and according to TechDows Google is working on making it more advanced.

It is not easy for many people to memorize complete URLs most of the time. And sometimes people forget the prefix of the URL too. This hampers the original goal of the Omnibox, which was meant to help users navigate to their desired destinations without any trouble. What happens currently is that when you enter an incomplete URL in the Omnibox, Chrome shows non-autocompleted suggestions at the bottom of your search. Now, this becomes even more confusing at times for the user to choose the right option that they were originally looking for.

So, to get rid of such issues, Google is experimenting for Chrome to autocomplete the prefix and no-prefix of the URL, and the prefix and non-prefix of the title in Omnibox.

So, its first implementation is to Autocomplete titles. Secondly, it will Autocomplete non-prefixes, i.e. suggestions will be autocompleted if the input matches anywhere in the URL. Thirdly, it will show titles in the Omnibox where currently navigation suggestions display only their URLs. And last but not the least, currently the Omnibox display one line to display the URL. With this parameter, the Omnibox will increase its height to fit two lines to show the title as well as the URL.

This feature is currently available on all Chrome versions under the flag “Omnibox Autocomplete Titles”, but for Canary, following additional flags are also available:

“Omnibox Rich Autocompletion”

“Omnibox Rich Autocompletion Min characters”

“Omnibox Rich Autocompletion Show Additional Text”


Screenshot: Techdows

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