417717 - idea: add search box for a specific website

Status: RESOLVED DUPLICATE of bug 482229

(Firefox :: Search, enhancement)

Description

[tester]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.8.1.12) Gecko/20080201 Firefox/2.0.0.12
Build Identifier: firefox 3 Beta 3

if the user clicks on a website icon (in the location box) he can see some information about the website, add there search box to "search in this site"

for example:
if you are on this website www.stanford.edu and you are looking for "admission",  you click on the website icon and then click "admission" and enter,
then you will get this result:
http://www.google.com/search?q=admission+site%3Awww.stanford.edu&submit=%D7%97%D7%99%D7%A4%D7%95%D7%A9+%D7%91-+Google

mozilla can even earn money form that feature


Reproducible: Always

Steps to Reproduce:
1.
2.
3.

Comment 1

[Jo Hermans]

There are bookmarklets on <https://www.squarefree.com/bookmarklets/search.html> that let you do this. Bug 246345 also contains a workaround.

Note that this would still use google or another search engine, and not the built-in search engine if the site has one (www.stanford.edu does), and which is much better suited. That's the main reason why global searches and site-searches are separated.

Comment 2

[Lucas Malor (mail: c6kfnkn2uc AT snkmail DOT c0m)]

(In reply to comment #1)
> Note that this would still use google or another search engine, and not the
> built-in search engine if the site has one (www.stanford.edu does), and which
> is much better suited. That's the main reason why global searches and
> site-searches are separated.

I agree, IMO this bug should be WONTFIXed (even if it was a good idea)

Comment 3

[cmtalbert]

I think it is an interesting idea, but we are not going to implement it in the main browser ui straight away.  If you want to try it out, I'd recommend creating an extension that does this and see if it seems useful to people.

Since we're not going to take this right now for the main browser, I'm going to mark as WONTFIX, but I do encourage you to try out the idea in an extension and see if it holds water.

Thanks for the thought!

Comment 4

[cmtalbert]

Adding Alex so he's aware of the idea in case he wants to override my wontfix...

Comment 5

[tester]

sorry, but i don't have the knowledge to build such an extension, if it's possible link this to the extension forum so someone will build such an extension.

note:
see also this https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=417721

Comment 6

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

I don't think this is clear-cut WONTFIX. We've discussed adding site-specific search functionality to the search bar before and something like this might be worth exploring.

Comment 7

[Lucas Malor (mail: c6kfnkn2uc AT snkmail DOT c0m)]

Mmmh.... I was writing that this will be not simple, but... what if you add an XML tag to a search engine to specify the syntax of a per-site search?

An example: 

<os:Url type="application/searchInSite" method="GET" template="http://www.google.com/search?name=f&amp;hl=en&amp;q=site%3A{site}+{searchTerms}">
</os:Url>

Search manager could be switched to a "site search mode", and {site} will be the site of current focused tab.

Comment 8

[tester]

a better idea is to add in the search box "search this site" instead of just "add "abc..."":

so if the user select this, firefox will look if this website have a search engine:
- if it does, firefox will use it to search, and add a small "+" icon in the search box (like in bookmarks today) to add the search engine to the engine list.
- if the website doesn't have search engine, firefox will use google by default to search in that specific website.

so now the user can:
1. use the search box to search in a specific website without adding the search engine to the list
2. add search engine like before
3. search in a specific website even if the website doesn"t have a search engine
4. the first idea doesn't have this integration

Comment 9

[tester]

or remove "add "abc..."" from the search box and add this search integration and "+" icon in the website "icon IU"

Comment 10

[Lucas Malor (mail: c6kfnkn2uc AT snkmail DOT c0m)]

If i understood well, your idea is already implement. For example, you can add the search engine of Bugzilla@Mozilla, clicking the dropdown menu of search box.

Comment 11

[Lucas Malor (mail: c6kfnkn2uc AT snkmail DOT c0m)]

(In reply to comment #8)
> so now the user can:
> 1. use the search box to search in a specific website without adding the 
> search engine to the list

Ok, I've _not_ understood well.

It's a very good idea. Firefox uses Google by default also to detect phishing sites, so I don't see any problems if Firefox use it by default also for this. 

All Fx have to do is to have a setting where user can change the default per-site URL search, preferably also in "Manage search entries" UI.

Comment 12

[tester]

i thought maybe using the website search engine if it's possible (to do a specific search) if there is no website search engine do this specific search with google (+"1. use...").

but there is one big problem that we have, not all search engine search in there site, for example:
if the user want to search in yahoo portal, the yahoo search engine is no good 

if you don't do this integrate you will also have problem, because sometimes the user will have 2 search engines that can do the same (the website search engine and google specific search) , for example: if the user want to search in youtube the "google specific search" is no good.

maybe the website need to give this information ?

Comment 13

[Lucas Malor (mail: c6kfnkn2uc AT snkmail DOT c0m)]

This must be solved by the site developers, adding a search engine.

Comment 14

[tester]

the right thing is to test it as an extensions

Comment 15

[Lucas Malor (mail: c6kfnkn2uc AT snkmail DOT c0m)]

Duplicate of Bug 146888?

Comment 16

[Alex Faaborg [:faaborg] (Firefox UX)]

I'm not against adding the ability to search a full site using an engine like google in general, but I also can't think of a great way of adding this to our UI that doesn't feel like we are bloating the interface.  I'll give it some thought.

Comment 17

[Lucas Malor (mail: c6kfnkn2uc AT snkmail DOT c0m)]

(In reply to comment #16)
> [cut]
> 

See Comment #8

Comment 18

[myles7897]

maybe we should it add it to the find bar. like "Search whole site" check box.

Comment 19

[tester]

if you don't wont to change the UI at all, you can late the user drag and drop the website icon in to the google search bar.
in fact not just the the website icon, you can late the user drag and drop a few icons to google search bar, and then do a local search.

you can also show the website icon in the google search bar (like the bookmark icon in the address bar) so by marking the website icon the user activate a local search with google.   

Comment 20

[Lucas Malor (mail: c6kfnkn2uc AT snkmail DOT c0m)]

I prefer your first idea, that is add an item to search bar for search-into-site. Drag and drop is uncomfortable and quite impossible to discover, icon in location bar is not consistent with current alert of search engine availability.

(In reply to comment #18)
> [cut]
>

A check box is useful if something like comment 7 will be done (but I prefer comment 8). Anyway a checkbox in or under search bar will be a problem since there's not so much space.

Comment 21

[Henrik Skupin [:whimboo][⌚️UTC+1]]

Seems like uiwanted is a better keyword for this bug. Alex, were you able to make some thoughts about this RFE?

Comment 22

[Lucas Malor (mail: c6kfnkn2uc AT snkmail DOT c0m)]

I added qawanted to ask in the whiteboard if this bug is a duplicate of bug 146888.