393705 - New location bar autocomplete never guesses what I want

Status: RESOLVED DUPLICATE of bug 393678

(Firefox :: Address Bar, defect)

Description

[dolphinling]

2007-08-25 linux trunk nightly

The new location bar autocomplete (matching on title, new ordering, = bug 389491) NEVER knows where I really want to go. Perhaps this is because I'm an unusual user (I type a lot of URLs), but seriously, it's bad.

For example: I want to go to wikipedia. I know wikipedia is at http://en.wikipedia.org/. So, I type into the location bar "en". At this point in the old design, I'd have a list of 10 wikipedia articles I'd previously visited, and would hit down to select one (or the main page, or edit the URL to go to a page I'd never visited). In the new design, I get the following pages:

http://www.gaiaonline.com/profile/inventory.php
http://www.frozenreality.co.uk/comic/bunny/
http://seattlepi.nwsource.com/fun/zits.asp
http://www.uclick.com/client/wpc/ft/
http://userfriendly.org/
http://exterminatusnow.comicgenesis.com/
http://www.gaiaonline.com/profile/inventory.php?mode=equip
http://www.gaiaonline.com/gaia/vend.php?mode=mystore
http://annevankesteren.nl/
https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/process_bug.cgi

Wikipedia doesn't show up until the 68th result.

None of those urls it gave to me are remotely close to what I want, nor do I think I would see why (if I didn't already know) they were given to me.



The biggest problem seems to be that matches are allowed in the middle of words as well as at the start of words. I think this is bad. I almost never know the middle of a word but not the beginning, and I never start typing the middle of a word. For URLs, there are a very very few times where I know the middle of a "word" (between two "."s or "/"s) but not the beginning; I would only match these as a last resort if at all.

I don't know if just that change would make enough of a difference for me without being able to test it, so I can't say if anything else about the ordering is bugging me as well.

Comment 1

[Nickolay_Ponomarev]

>The biggest problem seems to be that matches are allowed in the middle of words
> as well as at the start of words.

That's bug 393678.

Comment 2

[dolphinling]

(In reply to comment #1)
> That's bug 393678.

Ah! Why didn't I see that? I listed all the recent location bar bugs when I looked...

In anticipation of that being most or all of the problem, I'll just dupe this. I'll file another if there's still problems even after that.