I’m conflicted on whether I prefer this, or the default search engine loading in every new tab. That being said, here’s how to prevent your default search engine from loading every time you open new tabs in Google Chrome.

1. Click the vertical ellipsis [ ⋮ ] near your address bar
2. Click “Settings”
3. Click “Search engine”
4. Click “Manage search engines and site search”
5. Scroll down to “Site search” and click [ Add ]
6. Enter details in “Edit search engine”
   • Name: None
   • Shortcut: about:blank
   • URL with %s in place of query: about:blank?%s
7. Click [ Save]
8. Click the vertical ellipsis [ ⋮ ] for “None” in “Site search” list
9. Click “Make default”

Warning: This method also prevents searching from the address bar!

You can easily revert back to normal behavior by making one of the other search engines your default.

This works okay for me since search engines I use frequently show as links in the blank tab.

Why bother? I dislike being distracted by whatever my current default search engine decides to load. While Google search isn’t visually distracting, Bing search’s (for reward points) background images and news headlines sometimes derail my train of thought. 🤷‍♂️

Update: Attempted using javascript:location.href='https://www.google.com/search?q=%s (instead of about:blank?%s) to enable address bar searches while keeping the new tab behavior. Unfortunately Chrome ignores javascript URLs for site search instead of how they work for bookmarks.