59173 - Need better/advanced bookmark/history search

Status: RESOLVED INCOMPLETE

(Toolkit :: Places, defect, P3)

Description

[Ben Goodger (use ben at mozilla dot org for email)]

N4.x supported advanced queries for searching history (e.g. 'must match each of 
these queries', 'must match any of these queries'). It would be neat to have 
this ability in Mozilla. I have implemented a basic system that performs 
searching on an RDF datasource, and have wired it in to the Bookmarks find 
dialog. Once I've completed my work there, I'll attach patches to this bug. 

cc'ing varada and sspitzer because they expressed interest in this facility. 
Not sure how performant this would be for searching larger datasources.

Comment 1

[Ben Goodger (use ben at mozilla dot org for email)]

update URL to screenshot of implementation

Comment 2

[Blake Ross]

ooo..neat.

Comment 3

[Marcia Knous [:marcia]]

Netscape Nav triage team: this is not a Netscape beta stopper. 

Comment 4

[Paul Chen]

Marking nsbeta1- bugs as future to get off the radar

Comment 5

[Manoj]

The History search returns junk all the time even in M0.9.1 (Build ID: 2001060703)

Comment 6

[Ben Ruppel]

Okay, perhaps history and bookmark searches are supposed to be so fast that it's
unneeded, but it would be nice to have some indication that a search is still
going on.  ie: a throbber, the little circling arrow used sometimes, or status
text that says "searching" or "search complete".  I post this here, but maybe it
should be a separate bug.  "Need better bookmark/history search" is kind of a
general summary tho.

Comment 7

[Ben Goodger (use ben at mozilla dot org for email)]

Paul Chen is now taking Bookmarks bugs. For your convenience, you can filter 
email notifications caused by this by searching for 'ilikegoats'.

Comment 8

[Peter Trudelle]

mass reassign of pchen bookmark bugs to ben

Comment 9

[Prognathous]

The link to the screenshot is dead. Can someone please attach the file?

Prog.

Comment 10

[Miguel Gaspar]

Bookmark-related issues abound in bugzilla, but everithing seems stalled (bugs 2
to 3 years old still marked as new, future). That is an area that would improve
usability a lot, IMHO.
I am willing to work on this. Could someone point me to an adequate starting
point (Relevant files in the tree)? I have searched trough lxr and bonsai, but
can't find the stuff that really implements the searches (handling 'find:').
Please tell me something, point me to someone! (I'm not really sure wether I
should mail the bookmarks' module owner directly)

Comment 11

[Jez]

CCing self.

I've just come across this bug today after deciding to investigate when trying
to search for a history item, and needing to search by URL instead of title -
not for the first time - and not being able to.  I just assumed that this was
being worked on, but depressingly it doesn't seem to be.  I see that
"Improvements to Bookmarks/History" is the first item to be mentioned on the
Firefox 2.0 roadmap at http://www.mozilla.org/projects/firefox/roadmap.html and
yet there's no mention of it on Mozilla 2.0's page on wiki.mozilla.org - does
anyone know why this is?  Also, does anyone know if there's a more active bug on
improving FF's Bookmarks/History search than this one?

The problems I have with Firefox's Bookmarks/History search are numerous, and so
I will enumerate them below.  I've struggled along with these problem for a long
time, since I started using this browser really, and as Firefox's main concern
is really with the user interface, I'd say these should be pretty high priority
for fixing:

- You can't search Bookmarks by page title/URL; only by the tag you give the
page.  Not good enough.
- You can't perform a wildcard search of Bookmarks/History.
- When you get search result(s) from Bookmarks search, you can't do anything
with the results; ie. Right click | delete, Right click | Properties, are
impotent, despite not being greyed out.
- When you get search result(s) from Bookmarks search, you can't tell what
folder the bookmark is in, as you can when there is no search term entered.
- When you get search result(s) from History search, you can't tell what day you
visited the page, as you can when there is no search term entered.
- When you delete a bookmark and immediately then search for it, it comes up
even though it has just been deleted - usually needs a browser restart to fix
this erroneous result.

As you can see, there are a ton of problem with the existing search function,
and there are probably some more that I haven't mentioned above.  So, I'm
certainly adding my voice to those calling for this to be improved.  I'm not
competent enough at Mozilla's codebase to attempt to improve it myself.

Comment 12

[DIV]

Agree that this should be a priority area, and likewise can't understand how it's been neglected so long.  Checking other bugs suggests these reports have languished under a succession of contributor's responsibilities.
Similar bug is https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=83321 (Bug 83321 – bookmark search does not cover multiple fields), reported 2001!

I also can't believe that there is so little clamour for this.  Could it be that because it is such an obvious requirement (IMHO!) it prompts people to assume that 'someone must be working on it'???

In both searching Bookmarks and History it would be very useful to be able to find text in URL's, and potentially also to constrain dates etc.
I'm sure URL searching was allowed in Mozilla before (I still use this at home), and I'm not sure whether it's in 'SeaMonkey' or not.  [See comment by Ali Sobhi in Bug 249481 (https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=249481).]  
In any case, FF is the flagship product and shouldn't have to suffer without this.

Comment 16

[BugBot [:suhaib / :marco/ :calixte]]

The severity field for this bug is relatively low, S3. However, the bug has 3 duplicates.
:mak, could you consider increasing the bug severity?

For more information, please visit auto_nag documentation.

Comment 17

[BugBot (nomail) [:suhaib / :marco/ :calixte]]

The last needinfo from me was triggered in error by recent activity on the bug. I'm clearing the needinfo since this is a very old bug and I don't know if it's still relevant.

Comment 18

[Marco Bonardo [:mak] (Away Apr 25 - May 5)]

It's not worth keeping this open without a clear direction or UR study. Can search be improved? absolutely, but there must be a plan first.