[vatueil]

The rationale given by /u/justin_chrome for the change appears faulty. Yes, keywords could be confusing if they're short, e.g. "r" for reddit or "w" for Wikipedia, and if users didn't expect that the short keyword would trigger a custom search instead of searching for the term on Google.

But short keywords must be manually assigned, so only power users for whom the feature is working as expected would encounter that behavior. (Power users have probably also learned how to minimize conflicts, such as by using two-letter keywords instead of a single letter.) The casual users that might be confused won't run into the issue in the first place because they don't even use short custom keywords.

When Chrome automatically detects custom search engines, it by default assigns the full domain name as the keyword, e.g. "en.wikipedia.org". What sort of user would type out "en.wikipedia.org elephant" and get confused when they're sent to Wikipedia instead of Google? Casual users would have typed "wikipedia elephant" instead and gone to Google as expected. Power users would know about custom search engines (and probably manually changed the keyword to something shorter).

It's not clear who this change is supposed to help. Casual users who are somehow using keywords set up by power users? Users who knew how to set up keywords but forgot how to use them?

On top of all this the change was not communicated to users, so users had to go to reddit to find out what had gone wrong and broken their custom search queries.