507620 - Entering text into the address bar which is misinterpreted as a URL should run a Google search instead of showing the "Address Not Found" page

Status: RESOLVED DUPLICATE of bug 485588

(Firefox :: Address Bar, enhancement)

Description

[Andrew]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.9.0.11) Gecko/2009060200 SUSE/3.0.11-0.1.1 Firefox/3.0.11
Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.9.0.11) Gecko/2009060200 SUSE/3.0.11-0.1.1 Firefox/3.0.11

Frequently, as a software engineer I want to run a search for a class name in a programming language (e.g., Java) or enter searches starting with characters like "/". In that case, getting the "Address Not Found" page is completely unhelpful, and a search makes a lot more sense. Yes, I know I can use the search bar for that, but the current behaviour breaks expectations in that most natural language text does not look like a URL or component of a URL and hence will not be falsely interpreted as one.

Reproducible: Always

Steps to Reproduce:
1. Type something like "/etc/hosts information" or "java.lang.String" into address bar and hit enter
Actual Results:  
The "Address Not Found" page is shown

Expected Results:  
A Google "I am feeling lucky" search is run with the term(s) provided

Comment 1

[Ian Stirling.]

java.lang.string may be a valid host on the local network.

/etc/hosts - opens the local file /etc/hosts - as I'd want it to.

Comment 2

[Ian Stirling.]

I would suggest perhaps that there be some simple way of escaping a search - perhaps a leading keyboarded space always does a search.
As google - and I think all other search engines - drop them.

This would also allow schemes like searching for 'w foo' to search wikipedia for foo.

Comment 3

[Andrew]

> java.lang.string may be a valid host on the local network.
> /etc/hosts - opens the local file /etc/hosts - as I'd want it to.

Yes, but if either of these fail to resolve to a valid file/host, surely it
would be better for the Google search results to be displayed, possibly in
addition to an "Address not found" message. This could be configurable, but I'm
sure many people would want it enabled by default.

In the latter case, I am sure I'm not the only one who rarely uses the browser
as a front end to the file system, as its directory listing is a poor
substitute for that of a dedicated file manager application.

> I would suggest perhaps that there be some simple way of escaping a search - > perhaps a leading keyboarded space always does a search.
> As google - and I think all other search engines - drop them.

Yes, but this is yet another thing to have to remember, besides all the other tricks like searching Wikipedia using "w foo". My point is that the browser is just not being as helpful as it could be. I'm convinced Chrome has better behaviour in this regard, but as I can't run it on Linux I cannot confirm that.

Comment 4

[Andrew]

By the way, the text "/etc/hosts port" is converted to "file:///etc/hosts%20port", not "file:///etc/hosts" as asserted. Rarely would anyone Google for "/etc/hosts" by itself as this lacks context and has over 6 million results.

Comment 5

[Ria Klaassen (not reading all bugmail)]

I would use keyword search in these cases. http://support.mozilla.com/en-US/kb/Smart+keywords

Comment 6

[Andrew]

(In reply to comment #5)
> I would use keyword search in these cases.
> http://support.mozilla.com/en-US/kb/Smart+keywords

As mentioned before, I'd much prefer not to have to configure this on every machine I use and to have to memorise the required syntax. This should work out of the box. Let's get the application to do the tedious work!

Comment 7

[Elmar Ludwig]

> This should work out of the box

It does, most of the time. The only case where searching from the location bar does not work is when the search string looks like a valid URL, host name or local file path (as in the examples cited above). In these cases, there is no way for the browser to know whether the user just mistyped the host (or file) name or really intended to do a search. Redirecting users to Google when they actually mistyped the host name would be very confusing, this is not going to happen.

I see only two solutions for your problem:

- simply use keyword search (as Ria suggested)
- adding a search link to the "address not found" page (bug 485588)

Comment 8

[Aaron Slunt]

Elmar is correct here. It seems you want what bug 485588 is requesting.