407260 - Top autocomplete match results can be improved

Status: RESOLVED DUPLICATE of bug 404261

(Firefox :: Bookmarks & History, enhancement)

Description

[Aaron Leventhal]

Autocomplete match results should be influenced by where in strings the letters match.

Right now when I type 1 or 2 characters I often get poor results from the autocomplete matches. For example, if I type the letter g, I get everything I've visited that has the letter g *anywhere* in the name.
The top results almost never have what I want. For example, "Drinking is a fine art" is a bad match for just "g", and should come after "gizmodo.com" and  "Good morning Vietnam".

Chances are I am looking for g[something].[com|net|etc]/something or for something with a word that starts with a g.

I'm not sure if we're using a point scoring system for position in the list, but we could do something like this:
Matches score higher points and bubble closer to the top of the list when there is a match with
1. The start of the domain name or title          + 30 points
2. The start of an associated tag                 + 20 points
3. The start of a word in the path or the title   + 10 points
   (where word is a letter after a space or punctuation)
4. Any part of the URL or title                   + 0 points

The frequency of visits, how recent a visit was, whether it's starred, whether that match has been selected for these characters before, etc. would continue to do what they do -- they would also get various amounts of points.

I'm thinking of it in terms of a fuzzy, point scoring system where all of these things factor in but don't completely take over the suggestion placement logic.

Comment 1

[:Gavin Sharp [email: [e-mail]]]

This looks like a dupe of bug 404261. The comments there say that bug #394038 and bug #395739 will address this.

Comment 2

[Aaron Leventhal]

Thanks -- I looked but couldn't find dupes.

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