1368499 - Awesome bar would be more clever with fuzzy matching of results

Status: NEW

(Firefox :: Address Bar, enhancement, P3)

Description

[Pascal Chevrel:pascalc]

Type in the url bar any url or portion of url with a typo that you have in your history or bookmarks:
omzilla.org

ER:
I get proposed relevant content I have already visited, in this case mozilla.org

AR:
No result

Today, many tools with a search field such as search engines but also text editors make a search for the closest match if there is no exact match available with algorithms such as Levenshtein. 

It would be nice to have our awesome bar be able to propose matches from our history instead of relying on a Google search when there is an almost identical match.

Comment 1

[Marco Bonardo [:mak]]

It would be great, but also quite hard, since the urlbar contents are multi-language. Stemming multi-language content is hard and an ongoing challenge in general. Plus we don't even have an FTS index yet, let along doing a fuzzy search :(
Even if we had a fulltext index, it may be "easily" feasible only for English (and we'd need a way to tell if what the user is typing is English, that is another interesting challenge so far only resolved for strings over a certain length).
Would bogus content be better than nothing? Maybe, it would need experimentation.

In the meanwhile we could maybe try something simpler using the search engine, like, if we don't have any local results and search suggestions are enabled, fetch the first search suggestion and search locally for that. The search engine is likely to have far more resources than us to fixup words.

Comment 2

[Jens]

As a die-hard awesomebar user I'm hitting this frequently. Mainly when trying to go to a recent website; and then flipping a single letter. 90% use case for fuzzy search would be search through the history, bookmark, tabs for "url", "title" and "description" imho. 

Search engine autocompletion is another think (different scope).

Not sure why a fulltext index or similar would be needed for this. A fuzzy search as known from Firefox DevTools Debugger.html (when CTRL+P) or VSCode would be perfect. Debugger.html is based on fuzzaldrin-plus (https://github.com/jeancroy/fuzz-aldrin-plus) which would be perfect for this, see demo at https://codesandbox.io/s/71nom6zl21 

I think that manye users would benefit from a simple Fuzzy saerch (also on Mobile where typing is even more errorprone and cumbersome).