1506335 - long search keywords isn't processed when use Google by default

Status: RESOLVED DUPLICATE of bug 1618769

(Firefox :: Address Bar, defect, P5)

Description

[lolipopplus]

User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64; rv:63.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/63.0

Steps to reproduce:

1. install Firefox, set Google as default search, enable search suggestions
2. type: 1+2+3+4+5+6+7+8+9+10+11+12+13


Actual results:

the suggestion says 55


Expected results:

if you know a little basic math, you will know it shouldn't be 55

Comment 1

[Drew Willcoxon :adw]

We limit the max length of the string sent to the search engine, here: https://dxr.mozilla.org/mozilla-central/rev/c2593a3058afdfeaac5c990e18794ee8257afe99/toolkit/components/places/UnifiedComplete.js#934

The limit is defined in the browser.urlbar.maxCharsForSearchSuggestions pref, which is 20 by default.  20 chars is 1+2+3+4+5+6+7+8+9+10 is 55, so that's why you're seeing that.

We could maybe bump the max to something larger, but aside from that this is probably a wontfix because you could then find a longer expression that wouldn't have the correct suggested answer.

Marco, what do you think?  Do you remember why we chose 20?  It does seem a little small.

Also, I'll move this to Address Bar because this doesn't affect the search bar.

Comment 2

[lolipopplus]

> The limit is defined in the browser.urlbar.maxCharsForSearchSuggestions
> pref, which is 20 by default.  20 chars is 1+2+3+4+5+6+7+8+9+10 is 55, so
> that's why you're seeing that.

so why Google Chrome doesn't limit this?

Comment 3

[Drew Willcoxon :adw]

Hold your horses, I'm trying to see what we can do here.

Comment 4

[Marco Bonardo [:mak]]

(In reply to lolipopplus from comment #2)
> so why Google Chrome doesn't limit this?

This is a simple answer: because they are for profit and don't care about your privacy.

Now back on the topic, the 20 chars limit is a guess, there's no strong reason it can't be 19 or 21 or any other value. BUT, it was not a guess made out of thin air.
We're looking for a number of chars that allows to be completed in a useful way (long strings are usually not) and also we don't want to send too much information to the search engine, for privacy reasons.
If we look at privacy, sending 20 chars is already not a small amount of information, and in general it's unlikely longer strings will be completed to a meaningful result (the user is typing a long string because he can't find what he's looking for by typing less).
We could do to evaluate a better value may be to look at telemetry for number of typed chars before picking a result (provided we have something like that, I don't recall off-hand).

The case here is on the edge, because it requires all of the information and it doesn't really affect privacy (it's just numbers), so it should not be cropped. Maybe we could bypass the limit if we recognize the string is a mathematical operation, or anyway it's unlikely to be privacy sensitive.

Comment 8

[Marco Bonardo [:mak]]

let's just dupe to the newer bug 1618769, that is tracked.