The Chrome address bar, or Omnibox, is more than just a place to type URLs. It’s designed to be a smart tool that helps you browse more efficiently by giving you direct access to various functions and information.
One of the Omnibox’s features is “rich search suggestions,” which adds things like images to your search results directly in the address bar. While this can be helpful, it’s not for everyone. Some might find these images a bit distracting or just plain unnecessary.
Comparing search suggestions with and without images
The idea behind including images in the search suggestions is to make things quicker, but many people may not like this. For example, when you type ‘tom’ it may show a picture of ‘Tom Cruise’, which may be unwanted for some people.
Here’s how the search suggestions look with images:
Celebrities, movies, and other pop culture stuff are common triggers for image suggestions. This can be disruptive for those who want a cleaner interface.
Here is how the search suggestions appear without images:
Many prefer to use the cleaner, less intrusive suggestions, which is perfect when using Chrome at work or for research.
How to Turn Off Image Search Suggestions
While Chrome doesn’t have a direct option to turn off rich entity results, you can still hide those images. You just need to tweak an experimental setting. Here’s how to do it:
- First, open Chrome and type
chrome://flagsinto the address bar, then press Enter.
chrome://flags
-
Next, at the top of the page, you’ll see a “Search flags” box. Click on it and type either “Local entity suggestions” or “rich-entity-suggestions”.
-
Now, look for the flag called “Omnibox Local Entity Suggestions” in the search results.
The default setting for this flag is set to enabled which means you get those rich suggestions with images.
-
Click the dropdown menu next to the “Omnibox Local Entity Suggestions” flag.
-
From the menu, choose Disabled to turn this feature off.
-
You will see a message at the bottom of the screen saying “Your changes will take effect the next time you relaunch Google Chrome.” Click the Relaunch button to restart Chrome and apply the changes.
After Chrome restarts, you should no longer see images in your search suggestions.
Note: If you want to turn the rich search suggestions with images back on in the future, just repeat the steps above and choose either Enabled or Default for the “Omnibox Local Entity Suggestions” flag.