1182572 - Location bar search suggestion include things that look like URLs (e.g. "bankofamerica.com") which surprisingly take you to a search results page instead of to the URL

Status: VERIFIED FIXED

(Firefox :: Address Bar, defect, P1)

Description

[Daniel Holbert [:dholbert]]

Let's say you want to visit bankofamerica.com.

STR:
 1. Open Firefox Nightly with a fresh profile.

 2. Open a new tab and start typing "bank" into the URL bar.
   --> The suggestions looks like:
    [bank - search with yahoo] (selected)
    bankofamerica.com
    bank of america sign in to online banking
    etc.
 3. Click the "bankofamerica.com" suggestion.

EXPECTED RESULTS: I should end up at bankofamerica.com. (I started typing that into my URL bar, and I saw a suggestion for it, and I clicked it.)

ACTUAL RESULTS: I end up at a Yahoo Search Results page, for the search term "bankofamerica.com"

Comment 1

[Daniel Holbert [:dholbert]]

(This felt very "waaaait a minute..." scammy/location-bar-hijacky when it happened to me just now. This is something we should definitely iron out before this hits release, IMO.)

I get similar results in the search bar, but it makes more sense in that context, because clearly stuff in the search bar gets treated as a search term.

But I expect URL-looking-things that I enter/accept in the *location bar* to be actually loaded - not treated as a search term.

Comment 2

[Daniel Holbert [:dholbert]]

Chrome & Edge behavior, for comparison (since they both offer search suggestions from URL bar too):

 Google Chrome:
 - As I type in "bankofamerica", they don't offer any URL-looking suggestions -- just words.
 - When I start typing ".com" at the end, *then* they start offering URL-looking suggestions like
    bankofamerica.com/eddcard
   which they actually treat as URLs. (they don't take me to search results pages)

 MS Edge (via BrowserStack):
 - After I've typed in "bankofam", the top suggestion is to *directly visit* https://www.bankofamerica.com.
 - Additionally, there are some search suggestions that involve bankofamerica.com & sometimes some other words, but these are clearly separated from actual-site results via a header that says "Search suggestions"

As I type in "bankofamerica", I do get some search suggestions that involve "bankofamerica.com", but these are below a clearly-labeled "Search suggestions" heading, which separates them from actual

Comment 3

[Daniel Holbert [:dholbert]]

I can reproduce this bug in Nightly regardless of whether Yahoo or Google is my default search engine. 

It's easier to reproduce with Yahoo [our current default], because they start suggesting "bankofamerica.com" after I've only typed a few characters.

With Google as my default search engine, I only see URL-flavored suggestions when I've started typing the ".com" -- then I start seeing the suggestions that appear in Chrome as green directly-visit-this-URL suggestions.)

Comment 4

[Daniel Holbert [:dholbert]]

Attachment: screencast (w/ search suggestions from Yahoo, the default)

Comment 5

[Daniel Holbert [:dholbert]]

(Note that the "bankofamerica.com" suggestion does gain a more-descriptive "Search with yahoo" label when you select/hover it, as shown in the screencast. At that point, though, you're quite likely to be already clicking/activating it and going off to somewhere you didn't actually want to go [a search-results page])

Comment 6

[Daniel Holbert [:dholbert]]

Attachment: screencast (w/ search suggestions from Google, compared against Chrome)

Here's a screencast with Google as the default search engine (showing that this isn't a Yahoo-specific issue).

In this screencast, I type in "bankofamerica." and then pick a google-provided suggestion that looks like a URL. (and I end up at a search results page instead of the URL)

Then I repeat this in Chrome, picking the same suggestion, and I end up at the actual URL.

Comment 7

[Marco Bonardo [:mak]]

we can either don't suggest things that look like urls, or convert these entries to url entries.
My fear with the latter is that the user might wonder how those things entered his history, since he never visited them and they wouldn't look like searches (they are indeed direct visits). Would this look like a privacy hit? Should we provide a visual hint that these suggestions come from remove (something like "Suggested by Engine" text on selection?)

Comment 8

[Marco Bonardo [:mak]]

s/remove/remote/

Comment 9

[:shell escalante]

put higher as we would want to uplift to give folks better privacy

Comment 10

[Daniel Holbert [:dholbert]]

(To be clear, this doesn't need "uplifting" in the uplift-to-aurora sense, because search suggestions are only enabled on Nightly at the moment.  I assume you just meant uplift in the "increase priority/visibility" sense, though; agreed on that.)

Comment 11

[Marco Bonardo [:mak]]

if we want to do something, we have only 3 work days left to land the strings before the merge.
we are still missing UX

Comment 12

[Stephen Horlander [:shorlander]]

(In reply to Marco Bonardo [::mak] from comment #7)
> we can either don't suggest things that look like urls, or convert these
> entries to url entries.
> My fear with the latter is that the user might wonder how those things
> entered his history, since he never visited them and they wouldn't look like
> searches (they are indeed direct visits). Would this look like a privacy
> hit? Should we provide a visual hint that these suggestions come from remove
> (something like "Suggested by Engine" text on selection?)

As a general solution I would like us to be better about auto-completing common URLs outside of relying on search suggest. I.e. if you start typing a URL that you have never been too but we know it's a real thing we should just do that. But that's really out of scope ;)

Since we don't do any kind of general URL auto-complete for un-visited domains I think special casing this would be weird. I would rather filter out things that look like ULRs from the suggest results.

Comment 13

[Marco Bonardo [:mak]]

SGTM, thank you.

Comment 14

[Marco Bonardo [:mak]]

Attachment: patch v1

Comment 15

[Pulsebot]

https://hg.mozilla.org/integration/fx-team/rev/20c4068d787b

Comment 16

[Wes Kocher (:KWierso) (Not reading bugmail; email directly if needed)]

https://hg.mozilla.org/mozilla-central/rev/20c4068d787b

Comment 17

[Marco Bonardo [:mak]]

Comment on attachment 8646317 [details] [diff] [review]
patch v1

Approval Request Comment
[Feature/regressing bug #]: search suggestions in location bar
[User impact if declined]: we can't enable the feature
[Describe test coverage new/current, TreeHerder]: unit test
[Risks and why]: low risk, simple change, we can disable the feature
[String/UUID change made/needed]: none

Comment 18

[Sylvestre Ledru [:Sylvestre]]

Comment on attachment 8646317 [details] [diff] [review]
patch v1

The search suggestion is only available in en-US, right?
(I am running a French instance of Firefox)

Comment 19

[Marco Bonardo [:mak]]

(In reply to Sylvestre Ledru [:sylvestre] from comment #18)
> The search suggestion is only available in en-US, right?
> (I am running a French instance of Firefox)

it depends on the search engine definition file.

Comment 20

[Marco Bonardo [:mak]]

but notice the feature is temporarily disabled in Aurora.

Comment 21

[Ryan VanderMeulen [:RyanVM]]

https://hg.mozilla.org/releases/mozilla-aurora/rev/83d2d1a34a2f

Comment 22

[Petruta Horea [:phorea], Desktop Test Engineering]

Verified using Aurora 42.0a2 and Nightly 43.0a1 2015-09-01 across platforms that url-like suggestions are no longer offered.