Pivoting from conventional search to search-as-you-type: Our story with Mozilla | Hacker News Reader

Pivoting from conventional search to search-as-you-type: Our story with Mozilla

0x65.dev

72 pointskkm12 comments

I think this blog post could use more context in the first paragraph. I was pretty confused until I completely read it and then skimmed it a second time.

Something like "We provide the awesome search engine Cliqz. We built a Firefox add-on that enhanced the address bar with search-as-you-type results..."

Also, I wish their blog was at https://blog.cliqz.com or https://cliqz.com/blog as 0x65.dev isn't memorable (for me) and the header lacks strong Cliqz branding.

Any SAYT can end up negating it's own time savings if there is any delay or reprocessing of the search term. I'm sure it's happened to most people; when using a SAYT system (such as Windows 10 search), you see your intended result come up and attempt to select it but the search results update and change just before you can reach it.

My favorite is when I correctly type the next letter of my intended result because I don't notice it in time to "cancel" the keystroke but Windows 10 search removes the result from the list anyway. Then I have to delete 3 or 4 letters to get it back for some reason. Ugh.

Why does windows search suck so hard? I remember from day 1 it would totally miss files on disk that I regularly used and searched for. I would type in program names and it wouldn't find them even when they were accessable from the start bar menu. But it would eagerly return useless web results. Who even decided it was a good idea to add web search to the start menu?

Conversely the search in windows explorer has gotten much better on the Insider Fast/Slow track. It does what you expect and searches down the path almost as fast as Everything.

Before even in shallow paths you would type something, it would spin, you'd press enter, you'd be brought to a big empty search results page that would slowly find things.

I'm finding myself using Everything less and less.

I like the focus on user intent. After all, the purpose of search is to provide users with information, not present them with a list of search results.

Recently I switched from Chrome + Google Search to Firefox + DuckDuckGo and I'm pleased, surprised even, by how well this setup works. The user experience is great and the search results of both setups usually correspond.

Whenever I fix or setup computers for friends/family, I sneak in Firefox + DDG. Every time I've asked if they've noticed a change with "the internet" and internet search, I've only ever got "nope" or "there's a duck now". No mention of "it's worse" or "I want it changed".

It's because Google is so widely used that people are not aware of how good the alternatives are/have become.

I switched to FF + DDG too recently. I do miss some features from Chrome such as multilingual spell check but if I switched back I'd miss some from FF such as completely blocking autoplay.

DDG has been totally fine. I don't miss Google at all.

Can somebody in the know chime in on this? were there concerns over privacy issues? Did Google apply pressure? etc.

Personally I find any sort of SAYT distracting and annoying and also an unnecessary privacy leak, and I wish there's a way to turn off the awesome bar altogether and just have a damn textbox for copypasting urls into.

With the search box separated the Awesome Bar appears to just do a local search, so it is no longer a privacy leak and you can just paste URLs into it. Having done this separation:

You can tell the Search box to not do SAYT (whereupon AFAIK it doesn't talk to the search engine until you push go)

You can tell the main URL bar to not do SAYT over URLs from your history, bookmarks etcetera as you prefer.

Yet another business blog that hasn’t got even one link to the main product or company homepage. Such a sad failure of so many blogs these days.

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