Closed Bug 1676595 Opened 4 years ago Closed 4 years ago

URL bar suggestions ranking may be surprising

Categories

(Firefox :: Address Bar, defect, P3)

78 Branch
defect

Tracking

()

RESOLVED WORKSFORME

People

(Reporter: zargthesplendid, Unassigned)

Details

User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux x86_64; rv:78.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/78.0

Steps to reproduce:

Typed into address bar to quickly access a bookmark

Actual results:

Two recent pages that I will never visit again appeared above my bookmark. I cannot fathom why pages visited only once are deemed more important than bookmarks. I'd suggest recent pages - especially infrequently visited - should be below bookmarks.

Expected results:

For a while now, a bookmark I visit at least twice a week has been accessed via keyboard: address bar, type three letters, down arrow twice, then enter key, and I'm at my bookmark. That has been working well for me for a long time but it seems to be a new behavior since I updated Firefox recently.

Bugbug thinks this bug should belong to this component, but please revert this change in case of error.

Component: Untriaged → Address Bar

If possible, could you please attach a screenshot of those results?

Do you remember how you visited those pages? can you share the url of the bookmark?

Flags: needinfo?(zargthesplendid)

Thanks Marco. Sorry, rather stupidly I deleted the two recent sites from my history so that they would not interfere in my usual navigation process again. So I can't make a screenshot now. I visited the pages via a Google search.

Flags: needinfo?(zargthesplendid)

It's happened again. A google search I visited only once (sorry I won't share a screenshot as it's for a personal health issue) has appeared above my bookmark. I found this: https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/questions/923042 so I tried changing settings for places.frecency.bookmarkVisitBonus and places.frecency.unvisitedBookmarkBonus to 1000 but that did not work. Is there any way I can ask Firefox to show my bookmarks first, above everything else in the address bar?

The severity field is not set for this bug.
:adw, could you have a look please?

For more information, please visit auto_nag documentation.

Flags: needinfo?(adw)

it's hard to tell off-hand, it sounds like a general problem with the ranking algorithm, maybe the page has been visited very recently, while the bookmark was visited A LOT of time ago. Then the page could be indeed more important for some users (people tend to bookmark things and then forget about those, and suggesting those bookmarks would not be great).

We have some plans to improve ranking, this probably fits there in the middle, but I can't tell off-hand where exactly the problem is without being able to look at the whole dataset for these pages.

Severity: -- → S3
Status: UNCONFIRMED → NEW
Ever confirmed: true
Priority: -- → P3
Summary: URL bar suggestions broken → URL bar suggestions ranking may be surprising
Flags: needinfo?(adw)

Thanks Marco. I visit the bookmark at least twice a week, every week of the year. One thing has occurred to me: I only ever visit that bookmark in a new private window as it is for a site involving financial transactions (the bookmark is https://www.national-lottery.co.uk/sign-in). I'm just very cautious with such sites and don't open them in a normal browsing session. Once I've visited the site I then close the new private window without visiting any other sites. I don't know if this would affect ranking? Thanks again.

(In reply to Zarg from comment #7)

Thanks Marco. I visit the bookmark at least twice a week, every week of the year. One thing has occurred to me: I only ever visit that bookmark in a new private window as it is for a site involving financial transactions (the bookmark is https://www.national-lottery.co.uk/sign-in).

Ah yes, visiting the page in a Private Window doesn't store any information about that visit, thus the url won't gain any ranking score, it's basically like you added the bookmark in the past and never used it (because history doesn't track your private visits).

Ah, thanks Marco. It did used to work okay - even in a private window - and it seems to me it only recently changed. Is there an about:config setting or something I can use to manually give that site (and others) more ranking? Or is there a way to set bookmarks to appear on top of everything else?

As far as I know, nothing changed related to the rankings yet, in the last versions (or even years).
You can try increasing places.frecency.bookmarkVisitBonus and places.frecency.unvisitedBookmarkBonus by a lot, like setting them at 10000. Then visit them at least once. Though it may not work forever, this is effectively an "abandoned" bookmark for the system since it's not visited recently.

For now there's no way to pick specific subsets (like bookmarks) to be on top of others, it's a mixture based on visits.

Thanks again Marco, for the good advice. I'll give your suggestion a try.

Hi,
I closed this bug as wfm since, as Marco said, this is the expected behavior for FF.

Regards, Flor.

Status: NEW → RESOLVED
Closed: 4 years ago
Resolution: --- → WORKSFORME
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