1940591 - Typing w does not prompt to search for wikipedia

Status: VERIFIED FIXED

(Firefox :: Address Bar, defect, P2)

Description

[Dale Harvey (:daleharvey)]

Typing w will not match wikipedia, typing "e" will (if ebay is not enabled). This is because the code that matches engines was copied from the current autofill implementation that attempts to match the domain of the engine and not the engine name. The previous implementation had to ensure the muxer could deduplicate the hueristic result.

We do not need to worry about that with actions as the autofill result / hueristic are seperate from the actions and will not be considered duplicated either way. The match should match simply with the engine name for consistency / simplicitys sake.

Comment 1

[Dale Harvey (:daleharvey)]

Attachment: Bug 1940591 - Match contextual engines by name instead of domain. r=Mak

Comment 2

[Marco Bonardo [:mak]]

(In reply to Dale Harvey (:daleharvey) from comment #0)

Typing w will not match wikipedia, typing "e" will (if ebay is not enabled). This is because the code that matches engines was copied from the current autofill implementation that attempts to match the domain of the engine and not the engine name.

In reality the code tries to also match subdomains, so "en.wiki" would match "w", that's how the old tab to search did. Either there's a bug in the copied code, or wikipedia doesn't go over the autofill threshold.
The reason to go through autofill was to check that we're not suggesting an engine that is barely or even never used. What is the replacement for that heuristic? Or are we ok suggesting any installed engine even if it's not commonly used? Like if I never used ebay, and I type e, do we expect to suggest searching on ebay?

Comment 3

[Marco Bonardo [:mak]]

on my profile typing w suggests searching on wikipedia

Comment 4

[Dale Harvey (:daleharvey)]

I assume the previous tabtosearch implementation had to worry about not suggesting too much as these were urlbar results that would affect muscle memory however with this implementation I think that is less of a consideration. If a user is only typing “e” then going straight to the result then will be doing that on muscle memory (and providing the action wont change anything), if they match more than that it seems very likely they want the engine.

Josh has mentioning thinking we are currently quite conservative about showing actions so we can check in with him but I think we are likely ok with showing rarely used engines here. Obviously we will want to keep track but I think there is a justification for a simpler hueristic here.

Comment 5

[Marco Bonardo [:mak]]

(In reply to Dale Harvey (:daleharvey) from comment #4)

I assume the previous tabtosearch implementation had to worry about not suggesting too much as these were urlbar results that would affect muscle memory

The concern was more about not suggesting things the user doesn't care about. e.g. if I don't use ebay, why should I search on it? But typing e or eb I'd be constantly suggested to do that.
I'm ok with a simpler heuristic, maybe just check the domain was "recently" visited, we could use the revHost field to check for any subdomain. We could cache the info for the session so we don't hit disk on every search. Or maybe there's something even easier (store engine last used datetime?).
I agree with consulting Josh, I may just be overzealous.

Comment 6

[Pulsebot]

Pushed by [e-mail]:
https://hg.mozilla.org/integration/autoland/rev/720c50a23735
Match contextual engines by name instead of domain. r=mak,urlbar-reviewers

Comment 7

[Sandor Molnar[:smolnar]]

https://hg.mozilla.org/mozilla-central/rev/720c50a23735

Comment 8

[Ardelean Oana, Desktop Test Engineering [:oardelean]]

Issue is reproducible on a 2025-01-08 Firefox Nightly build on Windows 10.
Verified as fixed on Firefox Nightly 137.0a1 on Windows 10, Ubuntu 22, macOS 14.