481423 - Support "descriptions" for search suggestion results (OpenSearch)

Status: RESOLVED WONTFIX

(Firefox :: Search, enhancement)

Description

[SineSwiper]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.9.0.6) Gecko/2009011913 Firefox/3.0.6
Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.9.0.6) Gecko/2009011913 Firefox/3.0.6

http://www.opensearch.org/Specifications/OpenSearch/Extensions/Suggestions/1.0

According to the draft standard, the OpenSearch results format supports a Description field for each suggestion.  Currently, there is no support for this.  According to the developer page (https://developer.mozilla.org/en/Supporting_search_suggestions_in_search_plugins), it also confirms the lack of support for this field, but there is no bug recorded in Bugzilla about getting this fixed.

This is similar to bug 386591, which talks about the other missing field (result URLs), but this bug is for the Descriptions.

Reproducible: Always

Comment 1

[SineSwiper]

Correcting Version/platforms.  Also, I would request that the wanted-firefox3 flag be turned on for this bug.

Suggested uses could be either a tooltip that shows when you hover over it, or something in a similar font to the "Suggestions" text for each entry.

Comment 2

[Henrik Skupin [:whimboo][⌚️UTC+2] (away 07/21 - 08/08)]

Ryan, are there any plans to add such a description field?

Comment 3

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

Where would the descriptions be exposed? There isn't really enough room in the dropdown to show the complete suggestion in some cases (see bug 339363).

Comment 4

[gtambu]

why not on a second line (IE8 style)?

Comment 5

[Henrik Skupin [:whimboo][⌚️UTC+2] (away 07/21 - 08/08)]

Confirming for now. A final decision is still outstanding. Can we get feedback from the UX team?

Comment 6

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

What kind of feedback are you looking for? A feature like this is hardly critical, so unless someone comes up with a suggestion and is willing to do the significant amount of work required, there isn't really anything to discuss. Even then, I think it would be hard to argue that there's a signficant win in doing this unless it's commonly used by search sites, which isn't the case at the moment. 

Microsoft has a feature similar to this ("rich" suggestions) which might have more promise, but I think we might have other bugs on investigating that.

Comment 7

[Yuan Wang(:Yuan) – Mobile Firefox Design Lead]

From a design perspective, the current dropdown menu does not have much space to contain the suggestions. It'd be a tricky design challengeFrom a UX perspective, I am not sure whether this is what our users really need and what's value behind it. It's probably not a critical feature for most of the people.

People type in search keywords on the search bar, in order to access search. But people don't just stop there and expect to get what they want immediately. I believe they are ready to read through the search results on the site and pick the promising ones from there. The descriptions of search suggestions on the limited space are not enough to help with final decide-making.

Unless we have the evidence of the fact that this feature is in strong need, it could be hard to allocate resources to work on something that's hardly critical.