3 ms·

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 toward

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.