Update (22-Sep-08): As Peter Kasting from the Chromium team (I think?) mentioned in the comments, this hack is unnecessary. Simply go to google.com, click on Google In English, restart Chrome and wait about 10 seconds, which will result in the desired behavior.

Chrome is amazing. It really is. Ridiculously fast, ridiculously compact (less than 0.5MB installation!^†) and seems to just work, which is truly astonishing for a product of this caliber, particularly the first version thereof.

The one obvious deficiency I could find was that it decided on google.co.il (the Israeli version of the Google homepage) as my default search provider, whereas my preference is for the regular English version on google.com. The search provider settings cannot be changed and do not respect the homepage's cookie (click on Google in English once and you're supposed to be done with it). Apparently it uses a {google:baseURL} macro which does not appear to be defined anywhere, and the only workaround I could find was:

• Start->Run
• notepad "%userprofile%\AppData\Local\Google\Chrome\User Data\Default"
• Look for the line starting with "search_url": (for me it was line 8)
• Replace {google:baseURL} with http://www.google.com/

The damn thing still changes the setting every now and then. I'll file a bugreport with Google, but this should suffice in the meantime (search results rendered right-to-left can drive me up the wall).

Update: As Shy noted in the comments, the installer actually is a downloader, I just didn't notice the first time because I was doing other things while it was starting up. In practice, though, it's annoying as hell, particularly if you're on a slow pipe. Bad Google!