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Comment by jordache | Hacker News Reader

i hate how when I'm copying + pasting a url to a test or internal environment, to the browser address bar - I may have a typo in there, or an extra space. Bam! The URL just became a google search

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So I'm not the only one.

It's even worse than that though, enter 'myintranetsite' and hit return, and you end up on a Google search page. Instead you have to enter 'http://myintranetsite'

Type myintranetsite/ instead, this is faster than http:// in front.

Wow, a usefull shortcut I was not aware of. Thanks.

As you type, the name is still being sent to Google for search suggestions with every keystroke until the final "/".

If you prefix with "http://", no requests are made to Google (except "h", "ht", "htt", "http", and "http:")

> If you prefix with "http://", no requests are made to Google (except "h", "ht", "htt", "http", and "http:")

This seems surprising to me. Can you back up this claim?

If you have search suggestions enabled then "http:" will be sent. Firefox disables them in Private Browsing mode for this reason.

- https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/search-suggestions-fire...

No I get that part.

I guess I just had a different interpretation of "no requests are made to Google". It seems "no requests" was intended to be "no search suggestion requests" and not "no requests that leak this information to google".

> If you have search suggestions enabled then "http:" will be sent

What's the point of sending those characters?

Search Suggestions. You typed "h", maybe you want to search for "harpoons". "ht" might suggest "htaccess". "http" might be a search for "httpie". etc.

Yes, of course :-P

Doesn’t browser hit suggestions API on every type stroke anyway?

This is easy to turn off, in Firefox, at least.

On Firefox you can disable this via an about:config setting (set keyword.enabled to false).

ahh cool.. but a binary toggle is a bit to coarse.

it would be nice if the input string contains a whitespace, it will perform the search engine query for you automatically, or allow some custom regex expression to determine whether to query search engine.

Or just have two text inputs[1]: one for url and one for search, rather than trying to overload two functions into one text input and trying to guess what the user wants.

[1] https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/add-search-bar-firefox-...

oooo didn't know that setting was available!

In your search settings you can add keywords. So if you set ? as the keyword for google you can type '? foobar' into the address bar to google for foobar.

(firstly you should set a different default search engine)

It's been nice to use the Firefox setting to have a separate search bar. Your address bar will show more results from your history, which is often what I actually need. Then you can just hit the down arrow to select "Search with x" options.

My only minor quip is that your default search engine will be last in the list.

So the latest Firefox broke that for me. It seems to front-run my URLs as I type them and if the result is a 404 it sends me over to DDG with my URL as the search. :/ Really, really obnoxious but I haven't taken the time yet to paw through about:config to see if I can turn it off.

I often have the opposite problem: I'm on Firefox and try to google "FooError: Bar happened" and instead of directing to google, Firefox prompts me to select an application to open "fooerror links".

You can enable the search bar, Ctrl-k focuses on it.

- https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/add-search-bar-firefox-...

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