The new tab page is the one that appears in a browser when opening a new tab. In Google Chrome, traditionally it was basically a Google search engine, although recently it started to gain more and more components. The shortcuts have arrived, the recommended articles and now there are about to come shortcuts to searches.
Google is still experimenting with Google Chrome’s new tab page, after trying to add up to a mini-game of the day earlier this year. These shortcuts are displayed as squares with photos to touch when you have no idea what exactly you want to search for.
More things in the new tabs
These shortcuts are currently an experiment available in both Google Chrome Dev and Google Chrome Canary. They get the temporary name of query tiles or something like squares with searches. And that is basically what they do for now, launch searches.
These squares are shown just below the search bar and above the list of shortcuts, without being able to change their position at the moment. It is a horizontal list, which initially includes thirteen elements: news, movies, recipes, fashion, music, health, electronics, series, sports, astrology, education, investment and automobiles.
Its operation depends on the configuration of the chrome flag query-tiles-enable-query-editing. You can launch the search as soon as you tap on the box as simply add the text to the search, and it will be you who must press Enter to search. In practice, it is a quick way to launch generic searches. Perhaps too generic to be useful in my opinion, but keep in mind that this is the first test, and Google could refine the content of the boxes over time.
At the moment, these boxes are optional, and to be able to test the function you need to activate several related Chrome Flags. The most important is “Show query tiles”, although you must also activate “Query tile instant date” and it is recommended that you configure the others. The boxes take time to appear in Chrome and you may need to restart the browser several times.
Other settings available in the form of Chrome flags are “Show query tiles in Omnibox”, which adds searches as “filters” in the search engine, being able to refine them with a second level. Here are all the Chrome flags related to the feature, and what they do:
- Show query tiles – the master switch to show these shortcuts.
- Show query tiles in Omnibox: determine if you want searches to be added to the search engine as a kind of filter.
- Query Tiles – Enable query edit mode: If activated, the search is not sent, so you can edit it before sending it.
- Country code for getting tiles: the suggestions in the boxes depend on each country. Five countries are currently available to try out.
- Query tiles Instant fetch: activate a background process to get the content of these boxes.
As always, there is no way of knowing if this experiment will end in the final version of Google Chrome or not, or if it will be active from the factory or will remain an experiment. What is clear is that Google has not finished, far from experimenting with the new tab page.