Clearing Custom Search Engines in Chrome

In addition to your search engine in Google Chrome, the browser tries to be helpful by remembering custom search engines for websites you visit in the course of navigating the web. As some websites can become registered simply by navigating to their homepage, this can result in a very long list of custom search engines.

Unfortunately, the page to manage custom search engines in Google Chrome (currently located at chrome://settings/searchEngines) leaves a lot to be desired. This page has no mechanism for bulk editing. With over two hundred engines registered, I did not want to click my mouse to manually manage them.

Fortunately, we can activate super developer powers!

const nl = document.querySelector("settings-ui").shadowRoot
  .querySelector("#main").shadowRoot
  .querySelector("[role=main]").shadowRoot
  .querySelector("settings-search-page").shadowRoot
  .querySelector("settings-search-engines-page").shadowRoot
  .querySelector("#otherEngines").shadowRoot
  .querySelectorAll("settings-search-engine-entry");

Ah, right. So, the settings pages uses Shadow DOM, which makes getting to the actual list of custom search engines a bit of a chore. Query through a bunch of document fragments to get to the actual list.

const ops = Array.from(nl).map((elem) => elem.shadowRoot)
  .filter((elem) => {
    return !elem.querySelector("#keyword-column").innerText.startsWith("!");
  })
  .map((elem) => {
    return [elem.querySelector("#keyword-column").innerText, elem.querySelector("#delete")];
  });

console.table(ops);

I use the custom search engine feature to implement DuckDuckGo-style !Bang searches. So before removing engines, I filter out items starting with “!”.

If the table printed to the console looks good, click the virtual mouse.

ops.forEach(entry => entry[1].click());