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Comment by pkasting | Hacker News Reader

Regarding all the suggestions to change search engines:

Deleting the Google search entry is not an action that can easily be undone, and it will have drastic consequences, such as permanently disabling suggestions and instant for omnibox searches. Creating an alternate entry with the same URL does NOT suffice -- you can't manually enable any of this functionality on the alternate entry.

If you're having this bug, I suggest NOT doing this. Either sit tight until we fix, or if you do create a different entry, KEEP THE ORIGINAL so you can switch back once the fix is out.

--Peter Kasting, Chrome team member and owner of the Omnibox

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That sounds anti-competitive. So is there a reason other search providers aren't being allowed the opportunity to support this functionality?

It does, especially since I think IE and possibly Firefox allow other search providers to do this.

As far as I know, they are. When I type "en.wikipedia.org" and hit tab, I get auto-completions for Wikipedia content. Same for Bing.

Other engines can access this functionality just fine (and do, as other people have mentioned). We simply don't have UI for you to manually tweak the relevant settings. (There's a bug on adding such UI, but it's low-priority, so no one's gotten to it.)

Thanks for your openness. I must admit to being slightly amazed that Google would add an irreversible-delete-button to a consumer facing app, without appropriate warnings and whatnot. Is that just an oversight, or is it by design?

You must be the only person still amazed by shitty Google UX

Helpful, informative, and grammatically correct! Would read again!

If there were, and not for other search engines; we would have been complaining about Google being anti-competitive :)

We don't allow you to delete your current default engine, but we do allow you to delete other engines, because you should be able to get rid of things you don't want.

We used to have a "restore all settings" button that would fix this (among other things), but it disappeared in the preferences UI rewrite and though I've agitated for it to come back, it hasn't.

It's not completely irreversible, but the fix involves deleting your other search engines. https://code.google.com/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=84679#c4...

Oh oops. Deleted the original, will need a fix for that too.

From the Chromium issue: "You can recreate the default entry by deleting your "Web Data" file out of your profile and restarting. Note that this will completely reset all your search engines."

That did it. Only it kept my custom Google engine and added the old one back, which I had to make default.

Peter, can you give some guidance for those among us who accidentally removed the Google entry? Is it there a workaround we can follow to restore it? Thanks.

Thanks - can you recommend a workaround for the moment?

Create an alternate Google Search using something like https://encrypted.google.com/search?q=%s and leave the old one there. You can set the new one as default for the time being and revert to the original afterwards.

LOL. Somehow I'm not surprised that Chrome has an aneurysm if you delete the Google search entry.

Chrome itself is fine. There just isn't a UI item to add it back.

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