Enable Better Omnibox History Matching Arrives in About:Flags

Posted on 25. Feb, 2011 by Daniel Cawrey in Features, Tips

Along with the recently changed “about:flags” Omnibox UI, a new experimental feature has come to the newest builds of Chromium. It’s called Enable Better Omnibox History Matching, and we’re going to suspect that the description is fitting enough when it says “enables substring and multi-fragment matching within URLs from history”.

Judging by this Chromium bug report, there have been issues with the Omnibox not returning the right results. It looks like for some users whenever they enter in some terms the box returns Google Search results over history. That’s probably because if you just enter in a few letters of a query, the Instant Search just kicks in as opposed to looking through your history.

Despite some recent talk about UI changes, I still think that Google wants to make the Omnibox, well, omnipresent. In order to do that, it needs to be able to look up history as well as search queries and find that balance somewhere in between. What would really be useful is if there were an operator to specifically search for history, which I’m sure will come at some point. Or perhaps more likely is that there will be an extension.

Of course, you can always go to “chrome://history” and search, but then you’re not getting the best of everything by being able to use the Omnibox. How do you think Google can better incorporate your own browsing history? Have you found a trick to doing so?