Address bar = search bar

Who at MS and Google thought this was a good idea?

such a pain in the
"Who cares if seraching now requires more clicks, we've saved a trivial amount of screen real estate!"

 

It's not a trivial amount of screen real estate. Once I learned that ie8 was capable of searching via the address bar, I rarely used the search box. It's an exercise in redundancy and I'm happy it's gone.

 

This I think again is about personal preference.

I never use the search bar in IE 8 or firefox and not particularly like the combined version in IE 9 and Chrome.

I prefer the search box to be in the center of the screen so always go to google then search.

 

Is it an exercise in redundancy when you want to search for URL or IP address instead of just navigating to it?

Neither Chrome nor IE are perfect at determining which function the user wants to use at any given time, perhaps if they were the added effort to search would be more forgivable.

 

Yes, it actually is an idiotic idea because you never know if it will search, and if it does, it sometimes sends you to the first result of the search.
When Internet Explorer 9 was still in Beta I was able to find a word that would send me for example to the Wikipedia article - right away...
a) I don't like Wikipedia
b) it's not even similar to the address for a search term

 

i love it

cant live without it

 

There never was a reason to have a separate searchbar in the first place. I think it was FFx that introduced that idiocy, and everybody else followed suit. SearchURLs work just fine in IE, and have been doing so since IE6. No clicks required at all. You might want to use them. The one downside is that, unfortunately, while IE6 had a friendly interface for SearchURLs, now you have to set them up manually (by editing the registry).

 

-> Works fine? Except when it redirects you to the first search term rather than the google results page...
Or when it thinks it's an address rather than a search...

Besides the lack of a good adblocker that's possibly the number 2 point why I won't use IE9 -> a search box is very convenient.

Edit: And learning abbreviations isn't making live easier - you'll need one click anyway to select the "box" to write in.

 

No idea what you are talking about. None of this happens with SearchURLs. I type something like "b some search terms", and it bings them; or I type "w some other search terms", and it looks them up in Wikipedia, and so on.

To each his own, I guess, but I have never used a search box in my whole life.

Come on now, remembering those abbreviations isn't any harder than remembering the cute little icons you need to click on to get your search directed to the right engine.

P.S.: The one thing I'd really like to see, however, is an extension that would search in parallel on a several search engines at the same time, and create a set of tabs for the results. Now that would be cool, and useful.

 

This is why I like Opera where you can preset a letter to do a search; Entering "g Search Random" searches google for Search Random, whereas typing "Search Random" will search your history for stuff... among other things.

 

Well, if you know which letters to type it might work for you - but I don't know these letters and to be honest, I have better things to do than learn them.

Icons - I don't remember icons, I remember names - I don't recognize my Favorites by their icons but by their names. -> Same for the search box, besides I tend to use just one search engine anyway.

 

That's exactly what SearchURLs do in IE.

 

I've never got used to a separate search bar, but, I don't like how it works in Fx, it tries to figure out what I want. Just like clicking "I'm feeling lucky."
Guess it's a matter of settings.

Opera on the other hand works better for me, it ALWAYS returns Google search results, never goes directly to an URL.

 

But it's built into Opera so I don't have to worry about addons slowing things down

 

It's built into IE, too. There are no add-ons involved.

 

Great Idea for me, I cannot stay without it now, too convenient!

 

powerusers should love it as it's more like a command line: one place to rule it all.

non-power users should love it as they don't even know what an "url" is => they just type "google" or "youtube" in the bar, and hope to get something useful back. thats the main reason why search got integrated there: because home users don't understand urls and don't have to.

now it's just official, what was since years available as an error-resolving solution.

 

I don't think any home user has been confused about how URLs work since 1998.

Also comparing it to a command line interface is pretty inaccurate. There's no duplicity for what the user is trying to do when executing a command line statement.

Combining the two bars has just about turned the entire internet into one big mystery meat navigation fest. No way to see which search provider is active without clicking, no clicking on a provider to execute a search, etc.

 

you don't know home users, then.

well, your problems are yours. just get used to that way, it'll be the default in the future.

 

Indeed.
I mean, Pirx has offered a solution, learn the abbreviations but that makes my life more difficult. -> Heck, in the search box it even says "Google" as one full word, no need to learn some abbreviation or icon.

Oh, and I think my views on abbreviations and colloquialisms is known - and shared by some
Netzsprache: Lol-Speak wird offizielles Englisch | Digital | ZEIT ONLINE

 

it's a fact (proven by testing random users) that people still don't understand urls. and it makes sence. i don't care how my car works as long as i can drive it. why should ordinary people understand how urls work as long as they get the stuff from the web they want.

this should be something detlev understands actually, as he boycots anything technological and new, he should fully support it.

oh crap, privacy issues? not again.. blah.

 

I'm not saying the option to search via the "url-bar" shouldn't be there, I just find that not having it is a loss.

-> I cannot use IE9 for anything other than bookmarks, because I never know whether it will take something as a url (which I don't bother typing out because I'm lazy and I know the browser will correct it) or as a search where it suddenly selects the first entry.

If I have a Search box I always end up on the search page - from the url bar I have ended up on this strange site called wikipedia....

Maybe the answer is to use those search commands, but they require me to read documentation and to learn them, I don't need that for a search box.
And with your car analogy - it is actually better if you know how your car works, at least outside of the fine adjustments, that made the cars from Soviet Russia great, any capable mechanic could repair them. Nowadays you call a guy with a computer who can't tell you what the problem is because he hasn't got the software... and it it's not something that software solves e.g. tyre changes they forget to balance them out...

 

you never know? when it's an url, it goes to the url. if it's not an url, it's a search.

very hard to understand.

 

The problem is, it's not that clear cut.

Yes, if you enter several words it's a search - but if you do a single search word you never know if it s interpreted as a url or a search term, and it isn't 100% consistent either.

 

I think its one of the best ideas so far... I find it very useful, you just have to understand how it works and get used to it...

 

My favorite is when I try to search for a phone number and the address bar adds in its own periods and makes it into a (usually non existant) IP address.

 

it tries if it's a .com domain (and .net and .org too). if it isn't, it searches.

still consistent. it's software, btw, it can't be inconsistent. you just can't wrap your head around it, and that's okay.

the phone->ip adress thing, no clue, that's a bit stupid. doesn't happen on chrome, just tested. don't have ie9 here right now.

 

Still doesn't explain how I managed to get thrown onto a wikipedia site which was the first google search result for a single word...
-> Also, yes, software can be inconsistent, easily, either a bug or a bit of randomness worked into it.

 

no it can't be inconsistent. just unexpected. you enter a text, it interprets it always the same way.

in your case: that word will always trigger a search until someone registers a domain for it.

software is always consistent. that doesn't mean it does always what is planned of course.

 

For the record, this may be dependent on the search engine order. I have Google first, and, well..

 

Good God, you just click the little magnifying glass and your add bar turns into exactly the same search box you had before in IE7 and 8.
I never post but this thread is making me crazy.