[ajdecon]

Not necessarily. All a url/search bar needs to do is check if what you enter is a valid URL, then search if that fails. (And maybe also if DNS resolution fails?) If it's a valid URL, it never needs to hit the search engine... if it is, that's when you want to search anyway.

[tzs]

The default in Chrome seems to be to do search suggestion as you type in the unified bar, so for instance if you decide to visit linear.com and do so by typing linear.com and hitting return, after you type "linear" and before you type the "." it suggests "linear equations", "linear algebra", and "linear regression".

Their documentation says it is doing this by sending the data to Google whenever you pause while typing in the bar, and that 2% of these requests are randomly logged, and it is anonymized within 24 hours.