1330462 - Using a different search engine to search for the same thing one just searched for is painful

Status: NEW

(Firefox :: Address Bar, defect, P3)

Description

[Alex Thayer [:alexical] (she/her)]

Steps:
- Search for "corgis" with Google as default search engine
- Land on a search page like this: https://www.google.com/search?q=corgis&ie=utf-8&oe=utf-8
- Click on awesome bar, hit the down key to show suggestions and other search engines
- Select Yahoo
- Notice that we're at https://search.yahoo.com/yhs/search?p=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.google.com%2Fsearch%3Fq%3Dcorgis%26ie%3Dutf-8%26oe%3Dutf-8&ei=UTF-8&hspart=mozilla&hsimp=yhs-002 (i.e., we searched Yahoo for the Google URL)

Expected results: we should instead end up at https://search.yahoo.com/yhs/search?p=corgis&ei=UTF-8&hspart=mozilla&hsimp=yhs-002 (a Yahoo search for corgis).

We could implement this by either trying to parse searches that look like URLs to find the inner query, or by just remembering that we just searched for "corgis" through the awesome bar. The former option would probably be better for a user, since if they landed on that URL through some means other than the awesome bar, they could quickly get to another search engine that they prefer.

We could also display a little "Did you mean to search for http://etc..." notification, in case the user really did want to search Yahoo for the Google URL, but I think that's so unlikely that we should just let them manually enter it into the search bar directly in Yahoo.

Comment 1

[Marco Bonardo [:mak]]

moving to location bar. It's clearly a valid enhancement.

Comment 2

[Alex Thayer [:alexical] (she/her)]

Attachment: Bug 1330462 - Using a different search engine to search for the same thing one just searched for is painful

Review commit: https://reviewboard.mozilla.org/r/104632/diff/#index_header
See other reviews: https://reviewboard.mozilla.org/r/104632/

Comment 3

[Alex Thayer [:alexical] (she/her)]

Comment on attachment 8826757 [details]
Bug 1330462 - Using a different search engine to search for the same thing one just searched for is painful

Review request updated; see interdiff: https://reviewboard.mozilla.org/r/104632/diff/1-2/

Comment 4

[Alex Thayer [:alexical] (she/her)]

Hey Marco, who do you think I should request review from for this?

Comment 5

[Marco Bonardo [:mak]]

(In reply to Doug Thayer [:dthayer] from comment #0)
> We could implement this by either trying to parse searches that look like
> URLs to find the inner query, or by just remembering that we just searched
> for "corgis" through the awesome bar. The former option would probably be
> better for a user, since if they landed on that URL through some means other
> than the awesome bar, they could quickly get to another search engine that
> they prefer.
> 
> We could also display a little "Did you mean to search for http://etc..."
> notification, in case the user really did want to search Yahoo for the
> Google URL, but I think that's so unlikely that we should just let them
> manually enter it into the search bar directly in Yahoo.

This is a pretty much welcome feature imo, since we also discussed it earlier.
I agree that searching for a url is not common, and we should not optimize for it, if the current visit came from a search, clicking on a one-off should search for the same word. Thus I'd say we should not provide that notification.

The problems I see here, are mostly UX, for example when hovering the one-off buttons, we should probably temporarily show the search text in the urlbar, rather than the previous url. That may help clarifying what happens when you confirm the action, otherwise it may be surprising.
Thus, you will likely need some hint from UX, I'm pinging :phlsa for that (feel free to forward if needed).

Regarding the reviewer, you picked properly, no reasons to look further.

Comment 7

[Sylvestre Ledru [:Sylvestre]]

Clearing needinfo as Phlsa is no longer at Mozilla

Comment 8

[Marco Bonardo [:mak]]

Comment on attachment 8826757 [details]
Bug 1330462 - Using a different search engine to search for the same thing one just searched for is painful

This patch is too old at this point.

Comment 9

[James Teow [:jteow]]

We're experimenting with persisting the search term for default search engine result pages in the urlbar via Bug 1797754.

This is enabled in Nightly and early Beta. It can also be enabled in Release in about:config:
browser.urlbar.showSearchTerms.featureGate: true
browser.urlbar.showSearchTerms.enabled: true

While this feature is enabled, you should be able to select a one-off button while on a default search engine results page and it'll reuse the search term.