See Google search results in the top bar of Chrome

For years, Google searches have essentially worked the same way – presenting you with a vertically scrollable list of results that you can click or tap your way through. But the company is looking to shake things up a bit, if the latest version of Chrome for Android is anything to go by. By tweaking a hidden setting, you can enable a new feature called Continuous Search Navigation, which shows your search results in a horizontal bar above the main part of your screen. This lets you quickly navigate between your results without ever having to tap Back to return to the search page.

At the time of writing, Continuous Search Navigation is in a beta version that’s only available by turning on a Chrome flag. As such, the feature is subject to change, but we think it’s destined to appear as a standard option in Chrome sometime soon.

To enable it, launch Chrome, then type chrome://flags into the address bar and press Enter. Now type continuous into the ‘Search flags’ box until Continuous Search Navigation appears – select Enabled from the dropdown menus below it, then tap Relaunch.

Once Chrome has restarted, carry out a Google search as normal and tap the first result in the list. When the page opens, you should now see a bar at the top of the screen with further results from your search (see screenshot above). Swiping left will reveal more results. Tap one to go straight to the relevant page.

If you find you don’t like this feature

you can switch it off again by repeating the process above and selecting Default from the dropdown menus.