How to fix trailing underscores at the end of URLs in Chrome
Chrome lets you add a custom search engine to it which is basically any website that you search frequently. It happens automatically if you search a particular website often enough. Once added, all you have to do is type the first few letters of the URL, tap the Tab key and then enter the search term. When you tap Enter again, the search term will be sent to the website. It’s quick but in some rare cases, trailing underscores are added at the end of the URLs in Chrome. Here’s how to fix it.
Trailing underscores at the end of URLs
This might take a few minutes to fix. Open Chrome and click the more options button at the top right. From the menu, select Settings. On the Settings screen, look for the ‘Search engine’ section and click the ‘Manage search engines’ option.
You’re going to see the problematic search engines show up and it will appear quite a few times in the list of ‘Other search engines’.
Click the more button next to every single instance of the URL with the underscores and from the menu, select the ‘Remove from list’ option. Once you’ve done that, click inside the URL bar and type the URL of the website. The same problematic URLs will show up. Highlight them with your cursor and tap Shift+Delete. Repeat this until the URLs stop appearing and only the plain, simple URL with nothing extra appended to the end shows up. Leave that one.
This should fix the the problem. If you have this same problem with other URLs, you will have to repeat the same process for them as well.
Why this happens is anyone’s guess. If you have your Chrome data synced to other systems, it is possible that these URLs will come back because they’ll be synced to other Chrome instances. Search engines are synced if you choose to sync ‘settings’ in the sync options. You can pause syncing on your system, and repeat this on the other ones until not a single one has these incorrect URLs in the history and in the other search engines’ list.
Deleting the other search engines is a simple enough thing but if you’re wondering what the Shift+Delete keyboard shortcut does, it removes the URL from your browsing history and frequently accessed URLs. It’s a useful shortcut to know if you want to remove a search term that keeps popping up or that you don’t want popping up at the wrong time.
