402991 - employ qualitative criteria for history ranking

Status: RESOLVED INCOMPLETE

(Firefox :: Bookmarks & History, defect)

Description

[Dietrich Ayala (:dietrich)]

Andy Edmonds discusses this in the linked blog post. Some potential ranking criteria from his post:

* It’s a hub. You follow numerous links
* It spans more than one session. A highly visited reference page (i.e. a regex reference page) could have been visited frequently during a single session, but may not be as useful as true hubs
* Significant actions are taken from the page, like printing, copy/paste, rss subscription, microformat address access, etc.
* Opened but unviewed pages where you ran out of time, needed to restart, crashed, etc. — these actual deserve a special prominence

Comment 1

[Joe Hughes]

Here are some FF2-era notes on signals that could be used to gauge user interest in a particular page, based on how a user spends one of their limited resources:

* Screen real estate -- the longer a site is in the active tab (with
the window focused and the screen saver off), the more important it is
to the user.  (Could a willingness to enlarge the browser window when
visiting a site also indicate importance?)

* Bookmark hierarchy -- the higher up in the hierarchy, the more important it is.

* Interpersonal bandwidth -- the act of sending someone else a link is
some indication that that page is important (a well-done "send this
page" feature would help capture this signal).  Similarly we could
watch how much a user copies information on the page to the clipboard,
it probably means that they're sharing or saving it by other means.

* Visit frequency vs. load time -- assuming that users prefer to visit
pages that load more quickly, repeated visits to a page that loads
slowly (that is, a willingness to put up with slowness) could indicate
a site's importance.

* Paper -- Printing something out indicates that it's important enough
to want a copy offline, though these are often ephemeral uses like
boarding passes or driving directions to an unfamiliar place.

* Bandwidth & disk space -- does downloading something from a page
mean that it's important?

* Email inbox -- If the user is willing to share their email address
with a site, it's probably important to them; this likely applies to
other contact and financial information as well.

* Password memory -- If the user has gone through the trouble of
setting up an account with a site, they must have cared about it at
least a little (unless they're using BugMeNot :] ).

* Composition time -- If the user spends a long time typing into a
text area, there's a good chance that it's either important to their
work or something that they have a strong emotional connection to.

Comment 2

[Shawn Wilsher :sdwilsh]

This bug isn't terribly useful as it stands.  We should be filing bugs about specific ideas, and discussions should go to the newsgroups (either dev.apps.firefox or dev.platform).

Comment 3

[Gervase Markham [:gerv]]

Bug 451915 - move Firefox/Places bugs to Firefox/Bookmarks and History. Remove all bugspam from this move by filtering for the string "places-to-b-and-h".

In Thunderbird 3.0b, you do that as follows:
Tools | Message Filters
Make sure the correct account is selected. Click "New"
Conditions: Body   contains   places-to-b-and-h
Change the action to "Delete Message".
Select "Manually Run" from the dropdown at the top.
Click OK.

Select the filter in the list, make sure "Inbox" is selected at the bottom, and click "Run Now". This should delete all the bugspam. You can then delete the filter.

Gerv