Actually, you do: In Chrome, you can turn off search autocompletion for the top bar. It will search history and bookmarks, but not contact Google.

Which all of 0.0003% of people will actually turn on. It's not so much about me not knowing what is being sent, it's about anything users across the web type into the url box is sent to servers somewhere. It's not information companies need to know, anonymous or not.

I was mainly offering that to address jbk's personal concerns, and agree that as a default setting, it constitutes an unexpected information/privacy leak for most users.

I must thank you for this tip, that will help me quite a lot...