By default, Chrome has a quick way for you to search for specific text on a website and you can follow these steps to turn off the feature.
Google is constantly updating their Chrome web browser and one of the more recent additions is a new feature called Touch to Search. This feature is enabled by default right now, and it makes it quick and easy for you to do a Google search for any text that you see on a website. You may have even accidentally triggered this in the past and not known what happened until further examination.
With this feature on, doing a single tap on some text within a website will automatically highlight it, and it will bring up a search box at the very bottom of the screen. Swiping this box up from the bottom will expand the Google search and show you the results it found. This can definitely be convenient for some people, but it can also be annoying for others.
So today I want to show you how to disable this feature since there are other ways of doing a Google search from within Chrome.
Chrome Disable Touch to Search
- Launch the Chrome application
- Tap on the 3-dot menu icon at the top right of the screen
- Tap on the ‘Settings’ option
- Tap on the ‘Privacy’ option
- Tap on the ‘Touch to Search’ option
- Then toggle the feature off
Explanation
I appreciate that Google is making it easier to do a search from within the Chrome application, and it has been helpful at times, but there are other ways of doing this. I am not a fan of having Chrome highlight some text in a website just because I tapped the screen. I also do not like that the search box automatically pops up at the bottom of the screen and takes up screen real estate from the website I am currently browsing.
So, to turn off Chrome’s Touch to Search feature, you’ll need to launch the Chrome application. From here, you should see a 3-dot menu at the top right of the screen (even if you aren’t looking at a website). Tapping on this will extend a menu and from here you should tap on the Settings option that sits toward the bottom. Chrome has a number of options that you can tinker with, but we just need to tap on the Privacy option right now.
Once you get into the Privacy section of Chrome’s settings, you should look toward the bottom of the screen (scroll down if you need to). There should be an option here called Touch to Search, and this is the one we want to tap on. This will bring us to yet another screen where we have a toggle at the top of the screen, and then under it is a description of what Touch to Search actually does.
Again, this feature is turned on by default, and all we have to do is toggle the feature off from here. As you can see in the video above, I give a demonstration as to what this feature is and how Chrome will function once you disable Touch to Search. I also show that you can still easily do a Google search for any text on the screen by long pressing on some text and then tapping on the 3-dot menu that appears.
So you can still easily do a Google search from within Chrome even with this feature off. You just won’t have Chrome inadvertently highlight text just because you tapped on the screen where some text was located.
