3 ms·

Ah, the joy of getting search results instead of an error when you mistype a domain name. Or better yet, being forced to type http:// http:// when you want to n

Ah, the joy of getting search results instead of an error when you mistype a domain name. Or better yet, being forced to type http:// http:// when you want to navigate to a custom hostname. This combination address bar and search input must be stupidest UI element ever made. Thankfully at least Vivaldi allows turning this behavior off.

gleenn 3y ago
Pretty sure you can disable it in Firefox unless they removed this since last I checked.
stevage 3y ago
Personally I love it. Yes, it has the edge cases you describe but they are easily managed. More often I have the opposite problem when I want to search for a tech that has a dot in its name.
- nine_k 3y ago
  Try typing a "?" in the address bar before the search terms :)
  - stevage 3y ago
    Yeah that's one way. Often I add a space and another word.
kwerk 3y ago
The one I’ve seen lately is when I type a correct domain, but the autocomplete appends “ login” so I get taken to a search result with links that are not what I wanted!
serf 3y ago
another brain-dead 'feature' of all this is automatic URL parsing of search queries with a leading/trailing slash or colon. it's a victim of "all the ways for all the people", and it can't do either very well. The optimal middle ground for me was the separation between search query bar and URL bar. And why did we combine the two? Well, it was to reduce screen clutter and combine features so that we could make room for.... making the URL bar longer, generally far longer than any sensibly human-readable URL. Brilliant! (the REAL reason was because Chrome wanted to shovel people into Google Search as promptly as possible, and that started a Stupid Browser Trend that firefox got suckered into following.)
fnordpiglet 3y ago
I worked on the first implementation of this at Netscape many years ago. The intent was to move away from URL as the primary location specifiers and more towards a semantic web interface. Obviously this didn’t evolve beyond that first step of directing to search, and the semantic web effectively never happened. But the original syntax was if it was a single contiguous string without whitepace it was always resolved as a URL, unless prefixed with a ?. (Thus no need to struggle with hosts being searched etch. The intent was there would be other operators and ways of specifying some sort of resolving agent. It was a pretty interesting idea but Microsoft destroyed internet technology competition for the next 10 years and the rest was lost as the next time someone picked up basic web technology it was a search engine.
- grishka 3y ago
  That was sensible. Actually, I do search from the address bar, but I have it set up such that there's no default search engine. I have to prefix my query with "g" for Google, "gi" for Google images, "w" for Wikipedia, "y" for Yandex, and so on. On the semantic web thing, in the end, it turned out URLs are useful for everyone — at the very least because a URL is something you can share with other people and be sure they'd reliably end up seeing the exact resource you want to direct them to. Same can not be said about anything that involves web searching. Search results move around all the time for a million different reasons.
  - fnordpiglet 3y ago
    It was a younger simpler time, with more dreams and less dollars involved. I don’t think it should have evolved from what I did in retrospect. Search + URLs is entirely sufficient and I don’t think anything else would have ever emerged even without Microsoft.

gleenn 3y ago

Pretty sure you can disable it in Firefox unless they removed this since last I checked.

stevage 3y ago

Personally I love it. Yes, it has the edge cases you describe but they are easily managed. More often I have the opposite problem when I want to search for a tech that has a dot in its name.

nine_k 3y ago
Try typing a "?" in the address bar before the search terms :)
- stevage 3y ago
  Yeah that's one way. Often I add a space and another word.

kwerk 3y ago

The one I’ve seen lately is when I type a correct domain, but the autocomplete appends “ login” so I get taken to a search result with links that are not what I wanted!

serf 3y ago

another brain-dead 'feature' of all this is automatic URL parsing of search queries with a leading/trailing slash or colon. it's a victim of "all the ways for all the people", and it can't do either very well. The optimal middle ground for me was the separation between search query bar and URL bar. And why did we combine the two? Well, it was to reduce screen clutter and combine features so that we could make room for.... making the URL bar longer, generally far longer than any sensibly human-readable URL. Brilliant! (the REAL reason was because Chrome wanted to shovel people into Google Search as promptly as possible, and that started a Stupid Browser Trend that firefox got suckered into following.)

fnordpiglet 3y ago

I worked on the first implementation of this at Netscape many years ago. The intent was to move away from URL as the primary location specifiers and more towards a semantic web interface. Obviously this didn’t evolve beyond that first step of directing to search, and the semantic web effectively never happened. But the original syntax was if it was a single contiguous string without whitepace it was always resolved as a URL, unless prefixed with a ?. (Thus no need to struggle with hosts being searched etch. The intent was there would be other operators and ways of specifying some sort of resolving agent. It was a pretty interesting idea but Microsoft destroyed internet technology competition for the next 10 years and the rest was lost as the next time someone picked up basic web technology it was a search engine.

grishka 3y ago
That was sensible. Actually, I do search from the address bar, but I have it set up such that there's no default search engine. I have to prefix my query with "g" for Google, "gi" for Google images, "w" for Wikipedia, "y" for Yandex, and so on. On the semantic web thing, in the end, it turned out URLs are useful for everyone — at the very least because a URL is something you can share with other people and be sure they'd reliably end up seeing the exact resource you want to direct them to. Same can not be said about anything that involves web searching. Search results move around all the time for a million different reasons.
- fnordpiglet 3y ago
  It was a younger simpler time, with more dreams and less dollars involved. I don’t think it should have evolved from what I did in retrospect. Search + URLs is entirely sufficient and I don’t think anything else would have ever emerged even without Microsoft.