I am surprised not a lot of people at HN do this. Disabling predictive service is one of the first things I do after installing chrome on a new machine. Something about sending every keystroke made on the omnibar to Google makes me feel uneasy, it could also be the paranoid in me talking.

I would still like the search results to show up though. Just prioritized lower than my history.

What setting do you change?

[] Use a prediction service to help complete searches and URLs typed in the address bar

Maybe that one.

So that's why every time I start typing a reddit url, Chrome suggests I visit http://www.reddit.com/r/gone wild (sic, with the space in there).

There are a number of reasons why they really need to rethink this, default it off, or do some better filtering. Didn't impact me personally beyond the confusion but I could imagine that URL and maybe some others coming up in what appears to be someone's unique search or browsing history raising some interesting questions at work and/or at home for some users.