I've had this for Chrome history as well. There have been multiple times where I'm sure I've browsed a site with some keyword in the title and it just doesn't show up in search. I don't tend to have a clue about the time window it would be in either so I can't go looking for it, so I can't prove it.
Meanwhile their image recognition gets better and better. For those of you who use Google Photos backup, try a keyword image search in Google Drive sometime of your untagged photos ("beach", "face," etc.) You'll be creepily surprised on what Google is indexing, even against what they claim they don't (try some sketchier words).
I can one up that: I was living in Dubai a few years ago and have a number of photos of fancy cars I could never even dream of affording. If I search for “Lamborghini” or “Rolls Royce” it gives me the photos of those cars. I’ve never tagged them and I’m not an Android user, so they aren’t reading my messages.
All modern gallery apps have some rudimentary photo recognition, but I haven't found any but Google's that will allow you to search terms like "topless/nude" and find accurate results. I would never store photos like that with Google, but I've confirmed it works, and with how many promotions Google has run offering free photo storage with their latest phones there are undoubtedly thousands and thousands of unwitting users who have sensitive photos not just automatically backed up in some Google server, but categorized. Just imagine if these servers were to be hacked and that information was conveniently pre-arranged for extortion.
I understand image recognition searching for generic terms like "cars", but my point is this can even recognise brands. And it only returns photos matching that brand, so it isn't replacing "Rolls Royce" with "cars" to do the search.
I guess it makes sense to do this, given that most things they do is based selling ads, I'm just surprised it is this accurate.
Maybe, but it's also incredibly poor at the same time. When I search my photos for "dog" I get many many pictures of cats. But that's sort of understandable, since they are both 4-legged animals, right? Well, then I don't know why searching for "dog" also brings up pictures of birds I have in my google photos. It's great about 90% of the time, and the remaining 10% it's hilariously and completely wrong.
Chrome is much better than Edge in this regard. I have a website bookmarked and tagged with a very rare specific word. In edge, typing the keyword will never show up my bookmark. Instead it shows crap from around the world. Firefox and chrome do the right thing, my bookmark is the first suggestion.
I remember not too long ago a colleague of mine gave me address to internal monitoring system that we use. I tried to find it few minutes later in chrome omnibar by typing almost exact url i.e. page was aaa.bbb.com so I typed aaa bbb. It gave me nothing, just search suggestions. I'm guessing chrome does it on purpose. The less browser history they search in chrome and show back to you the more you'll go to google web search and that's ad money for them.
That's why I'm back on Firefox after quantum release. I hope mozilla never, ever, ever does something like this but I remember seeing something similar on nightly once. It gave you search suggestions first, that redirected you to google, with option to disable it in settings.
