How to Turn Off Images in Search Results in Chrome’s Address Bar
The latest and greatest version of Google Chrome makes changes that most people are unlikely to notice, such as the settings for how the browser loads pages and images. One feature that most people will notice, however, is the images that appear when you do a search in Chrome’s address bar, or “Omnibox.”
These new images can be useful visuals for searches, although they only appear for certain types of searches, such as celebrity names, and are subject to certain copyright and privacy restrictions. But if you find these new images more annoying than helpful, there are several ways to disable them in the desktop version of Chrome.
The easiest is to just completely switch to another search engine , since only Google results display images in the omnibox. You can do this in your browser settings:
- Click the icon with three folded dots, then click Settings.
- On the settings page, scroll down to Search Engine, then click the drop-down box and select non-Google.
- If you don’t see the one you want to use listed, the Manage Search Engines option allows you to add or remove search engines such as DuckDuckGo .
However, if you want to keep Google as your default search engine, you need to configure the Chrome flag to remove images.
In this case, we’re looking for the “offer extended omnibox entities” flag (thanks to Ghacks for pointing it initially ). Get there:
- Copy and paste chrome: // flags / # omnibox-rich-entity-questions into Chrome’s address bar and press Enter. You will be taken directly to the Chrome flags page with the “Omnibox extended entity suggestions” highlighted.
- Click the dropdown next to the flag and set it to disabled.
- Close and restart Chrome for the changes to take effect.
Google often adds and removes both features and flags from Chrome, so it’s entirely possible that omnibox images can come and go, just like many other ideas Google has tried out. It’s also possible that Google may remove the aforementioned flag that will make everyone see these omnibox search images. (In other words, if this trick stops working, blame Google.)