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Issue metadata

Status: Available
Owner: ----
Components:
EstimatedDays: ----
NextAction: ----
OS: Linux , Mac
Pri: 3
Type: Bug



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Fixup heuristic for /foo/bar being a path is too aggressive

Reported by tomac...@gmail.com, May 31 2017

Issue description

UserAgent: Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10_12_0) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/58.0.3029.110 Safari/537.36

Steps to reproduce the problem:
1. Search for "/sbin/mount.vboxsf: mounting failed with the error: No such device" in the search bar

What is the expected behavior?
I should see the google search results for "/sbin/mount.vboxsf: mounting failed with the error: No such device"

What went wrong?
Chrome did not detect that the intention was to search because of the pathname component. Instead, it transliterated the search strinng into URL encoding: "file:///sbin/mount.vboxsf:%20mounting%20failed%20with%20the%20error:%20No%20such%20device"

Did this work before? No 

Chrome version: 58.0.3029.110  Channel: stable
OS Version: OS X 10.12.0
Flash Version: 

I don't see there as being a general use for URL encoding spaces. It might be nice for developers, but we know that 99% of users aren't going to be hand constructing URLs at all.

If there are spaces in the search bar, it should be a search.
 

Comment 1 by meh...@chromium.org, May 31 2017

Components: -UI UI>Browser>Omnibox
Labels: -Pri-2 -Via-Wizard-UI OS-Linux Pri-3
Status: Untriaged (was: Unconfirmed)
Summary: Fixup heuristic for /foo/bar being a path is too aggressive (was: When a paragraph of text is inputted to the search bar, if it began with a /, then it is considered a URL despite other clear and obvious indicators that it is not a URL)
This is actually platform-specific.  On Windows, for example, "/sbin/mount.vboxsf: mounting failed with the error: No such device" searches by default.

I think there's an aggressive heuristic in fixup that says /foo/bar is a path on POSIX systems.  However, it seems overly aggressive here.  I can't suggest a specific tweak without looking at precisely how this works today.

Comment 3 by tomac...@gmail.com, May 31 2017

I don't have a windows machine, but "C:\Windows directory" text might duplicate the behavior on Windows.

"www.google.com aaa" => searches ok
"https://www.google.com site not found" => searchs ok

Comment 4 by tomac...@gmail.com, May 31 2017

I think I see what could be the source problem. On Windows/Linux filesystems, you have the potential for pathnames with spaces in them. So, everything is per-se a valid path. ie. in folder "/sbin" there could be a file or folder named "mount.vboxsf: mounting failed with the error: No such device". Still, it doesn't give definitive evidence that the user is looking for a file either (its pretty rare that a user would type in a file path to the search bar IMO - there are better ways to navigate to a file like Open or drag and drop).
Yes, in principle, this should be classified as "UNKNOWN", which is the type for "might be either a search or a nav, but was more likely intended as a search".
Status: Available (was: Untriaged)
Labels: Hotlist-OmniboxRanking
Project Member

Comment 8 by sheriffbot@chromium.org, Jul 20

Labels: Hotlist-Recharge-Cold
Status: Untriaged (was: Available)
This issue has been Available for over a year. If it's no longer important or seems unlikely to be fixed, please consider closing it out. If it is important, please re-triage the issue.

Sorry for the inconvenience if the bug really should have been left as Available.

For more details visit https://www.chromium.org/issue-tracking/autotriage - Your friendly Sheriffbot
Status: Available (was: Untriaged)

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