GNOME Bugzilla – Bug 668987
conducting web searches should be more difficult (to deal with typos)
Last modified: 2012-05-12 08:28:07 UTC
i tend to open applications by hitting the meta key then typing the first few letters of the app and hitting enter. usually i do this fast enough that it's a single action to me -- i have no feedback from the computer during this time (just because it's such a short period of time). i'm not looking at the search box. [meta]fi[enter] [meta]evo[enter] [meta]term[enter] sometimes i make a mistake and type [meta]temr[enter] and i only find out about it by firefox starting up and doing a wikipedia search for me. we either need to have much better fuzzy-matching of results or we need to make it more difficult do conduct a web-search. a baseline suggestion for the latter would be requiring enter to be pressed twice for websearches. that would mean i get to type '[meta]temr[enter]' and notice that nothing is happening then [backspace][backspace] to fix the obvious problem.
The base issue seems to be that the search field is actually searching in two different domains: the user's own (applications, files, contacts...) and everybody else's (the web). Search is indicated by two transparent buttons at the bottom of the screen, removed from the user's locus of attention and too easy to miss. There is little to no hint that pressing Enter with no results will perform a Wikipedia search. A possible solution would be to simply remove the open search system as suggested in bug #670168. Another option could be to change the look and position of the search buttons, to make them more apparent, and to not give them focus by default so that one has to explicitly choose to perform a Web search, rather than it being a typo-catcher.
Marking as duplicate, as the best way to make Web search more difficult is really... to remove it. ;-) *** This bug has been marked as a duplicate of bug 670168 ***