1940356 - Results ranking should take both word boundaries into account when a word is followed by a space

Status: NEW

(Firefox :: Address Bar, enhancement, P3)

Description

[Will]

Attachment: redditURLfirefox.png

Example: open a new tab and type "red" into the URL bar. In my case, all the results are reddit, which is correct and makes sense, but then I hit spacebar after "red", that means reddit results should no longer come up or at least be prioritized below things that say "red" (you can see in the screenshot that Firefox is still bolding the "red" in "Reddit" even though I hit the spacebar). When I hit the spacebar, I believe URL's such as https://www.red.com/v-raptor-x-black?quantity=1&vxpackage=3 should have shown up (I had this URL bookmarked).

Comment 1

[Will]

Noticing the same problem when search "red " in the Library window (bookmarks manager and history manager). Not sure if this should be file as a separate bug or not.

Comment 2

[Will]

Sorry for another follow up comment but I did a bit of a clumsy job of explaining: of course in the type of result I'm saying should come up is https://www.red.com/v-raptor-x-black?quantity=1&vxpackage=3 , there is no space after the "red", it's "red.com". I'm not suggesting it literally exactly match spaces, what I'm saying is that spacebar acts as a separator of sorts. If it exactly matched spaces, https://www.red.com/v-raptor-x-black?quantity=1&vxpackage=3 would not come up in the results, which would be bad.

Comment 3

[Albert Scheiner [:alberts]]

If you just visit https://www.red.com/ the tab's title is "RED Digital Cinema | Professional Cameras", which includes "red " - with a space. It did not show up in my test ahead of reddit matches, as you expect it in this ticket.

Comment 4

[Marco Bonardo [:mak]]

Currently results are just matched and then sorted based on how commonly the user uses that web site. Historically the system moved towards fuzzier searches.
I think your expectations are not wrong anyway, but there's risk of pushing up something that is not particularly relevant to the user.
We could run a first search on boundaries... though that's exactly what we do, but red is on the start boundary of reddit. So we'd need a previous search for an exact word in this case, and a relevancy threshold.

Comment 5

[Will]

Attachment: whole words.png

When I hit the spacebar after "red", that should have made "reddit" matches/results get prioritized below pure "red" matches/results like https://www.red.com/v-raptor-x-black?quantity=1&vxpackage=3 . Basically, hitting the spacebar should almost be the equivalent of checking the "Whole Words" option in the Find in page bar.

Comment 6

[Will]

Btw, the search within the Library window (when searching in History or Bookmarks) has the same problem. Would that be a separate bug or would that be considered the same as this bug?

Comment 7

[Marco Bonardo [:mak]]

it's ok to file a separate bug and add a See Also to this one. Under the hood they are using the same matching anyway.