1562421 - Leading plus sign is ignored when searching from the address bar

Status: RESOLVED DUPLICATE of bug 1560228

(Firefox :: Address Bar, defect, P3)

Description

[giul.mus]

To reproduce, type "+hello" in the address bar.

One of the options will be "hello ⁠— Search with $engine"; note that the leading plus sign is ignored. Indeed, if the option is selected it will search for "hello". Only the first plus sign is ignored, as typing "+++hello" will give an option for "++hello".

This does not occur for the search suggestions at the bottom of the list of options, nor for the search bar that is separate from the address bar.

Comment 1

[Marco Bonardo [:mak] (Away 10-21 August)]

yes, we ignore some chars at the beginning because those are special and can be used to limit results to a specific subset. What's your use case for that?

Comment 2

[giul.mus]

The specific query with which I ran into this issue was searching for a phone number in international format, eg. [phone]. I know I can search for that with Ctrl+K or quotation marks, it's just that this specific behaviour is unexpected (and I think most users would feel like that).

I'm not convinced about the thing with special characters. This issue does not occur with the minus character, which is used in many search engines to exclude words, but it occurs with eg. the plus and the percent sign, which to my knowledge are not meaningful operators in Google Search.

Comment 3

[Marco Bonardo [:mak] (Away 10-21 August)]

we should better detect math and phone numbers indeed. In the future we'll evaluate better systems than special chars.

Comment 4

[Marco Bonardo [:mak] (Away 10-21 August)]

let's just dupe to bug 1560228, we'll only strip a leading ?, nothing else.