Bookmarks Search
John Bird
Once the number of tabs open, or history, or bookmarks gets more than a page
full there *must* to be a simple way of searching through them. These days
most users are familiar with quick find mechanisms such as Google Desktop
Search (This is the only way I ever search my email), or the Vista menu
search, or the Apple Spotlight. Most help systems also have a topic or
index search that shows a list of topics matching a keyword. Any large
database product also allows filtered searches on a keyword.....
I think Firefox is very much in need of this too!!! - and it could be a
stand-out feature for Version 3. Much of the facility is already present,
but needs to be enhanced - it is in the excellent sidebar (CTRL+B) window as
a quick search of bookmarks. Only problem is I almost never use the sidebar
and prefer to get to bookmarks via the menu, where funnily enough the quick
search is not present, and it is too clunky (slow and inconvenient) to open
the bookmarks sidebar just to get to the search, and it needs to search more
than bookmarks as well...
See mock-up at: http://jbclnz.googlepages.com/firefoxv3-search1
I recommend:
Either in the bookmarks menu, or if there is space a small search window in
one of the toolbars. Or it could even be in the Address bar itself -
especially if prefixed by something like "find:". If I type anything in
there, it searches several things in order:
-Page history of open pages (like the URL auto-complete at present)
-Bookmarks - searching both the URL and the page description. It should
also show matching bookmark folder names as well (it doesn't at present),
and which folder a found bookmark is in. I have already well more than a
screen full of top level bookmark folders so either I need a search or I
will have to stop using bookmarks as they have got too big to easily use.
-The URL's and page titles of all open tabs. This is a big issue for me
with usually more than 50 tabs open, and it is hard to find if a particular
page is already open somewhere. If I selected this from a list and the
browser was to switch to this open tab this would be a seriously useful
feature to me!
-Tags if the tag system is added....although I think an enhanced search like
this might be more useful than tags - to me anyway.
-Maybe a google search as well on the end (optional - but some makes sense
if the searches are typed in the Address Bar). Or an option at the end
"Search Google(*) for results". (* or your preferred search engine).
Each of these could be listed in order, with a little icon at the left
saying which section they are found in, or a little break in between each
section.
In the Firefox options there could be a simple set of tick boxes which areas
are to be searched, I realise that you might think for most normal users
they don't want a search of all these areas, so not all might be turned on
by default, but make it really easy to turn them on, as power users like me
would love to!
This combines several areas of functionality in Firefox - the Bookmark
sidebar, the Bookmark menu, the drop down tab list, and the autocomplete
functions of the Address Bar.
Having one simple central place to search would be terrific even for novice
users, who are always for instance typing in Google search terms into the
Address Bar - that is having to choose between two places on the screen to
type in either an address or search term is already confusing to a lot of
users!
One picture is worth a 1000 words, so see a mockup at:
http://jbclnz.googlepages.com/firefoxv3-search1
John
<previous message>
I think that the suggested links should not just be those where the
domain name starts with the phrase that?s being typed, like is the case
currently. Instead it should show any link that contains the phrase in
part of its information set (including page title and url), sorted by a
combination of ?popularity? (a combination of number of visits and how
long ago those visits were), and what part of the information contains
the phrase (e.g. if it?s in the domain name then it gets a slightly
higher weight). This will give much better suggestions that cover more
than just the domain name, and also let the user to find short phrases
that identify a site more uniquely.
To illustrate, if I currently type ?places?, when I get as far as ?pla?
I only get a few suggestions from ?player.omroep.nl? (which I relatively
rarely visit, and is a player pop-up too) and
?playstationhomeinsider.googlepages.com? (which I?ve probably not
visited more than once), and once I fully typed ?places? there are no
suggestions at all. Even though I just visited these very relevant pages
with Places in both the title and the URL, and have read various blogs
on the subject in the past.
= Page information stored =
In addition to the page title and URL, you should also store the
contents of the ?description? and ?keywords? META tags contained in a
page, and use it for the search bar suggestions. This so that if a user
types ?html?, www.w3.org will appear in the suggestions, or if ?ipod? is
typed, apple.com would show up.
Having this would put the descriptions and keywords on many pages to
good use, better expose them to the user (and thus giving them a higher
probability to be properly up-to-date), and also provide incentive for
web site owners to add these. It will also discourage the page author
from abusing the page title to provide a description and keywords for
the page by giving them a better means to do so (see e.g. [1]).
Ideally, you would also extract keywords from the page content, by e.g.
doing a frequency analysis of words, removing certain common words like
?the? and ?think?, and storing the top-100. But I think that that?s kind
of complex, and for now storing just the meta-information (in addition
to the page title and URL) will suffice.
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This would provide a much better address bar suggestions behaviour than
currently exists, and which I?ve been frustrated with for a long time.
Now that this great Places stuff is introduced in Firefox, I think this
is a good opportunity to combine this with a real improvement to the
user experience of address bar suggestions.