UserAgent: Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10_13_6) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/68.0.3440.106 Safari/537.36

Steps to reproduce the problem:
1. From a Terminal run
ls ~/Library/Application Support/Google/Chrome/.metadata_never_index 

What is the expected behavior?
Nothing to be matched

What went wrong?
The .metadata_never_index despite the fact it is a placebo.

Did this work before? N/A 

Chrome version: 68.0.3440.106  Channel: n/a
OS Version: OS X 10.13.6
Flash Version: 

Over in https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=810617#c3 @sdy is 100% correct - .metadata_never_index doesn't actually seem to do anything in modern macOS (at least 10.13) despite being widely mentioned as preventing spotlight indexing on the web. There is a report that it only has an impact at volume level over on https://apple.stackexchange.com/questions/92784/preventing-spotlight-from-indexing-files-folders#comment396013_92785 . People are even citing Chrome as a reason to use it on sub folders - https://github.com/npm/npm/issues/15346#issuecomment-309305390 ! Can you remove this useless file?

For what it's worth there are a list of builtin folders that Spotlight won't index and these include:
Directories and files that start with a dot (.)
Hidden folders (those whose extended flags mark them as hidden)
Folders whose name ends in .noindex
Files the user has explicitly excluded