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Why does the address bar autocomplete give preference to commercial sites?

  • 5 replies
  • 1 has this problem
  • 2 views
  • Last reply by cor-el

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Examples:

Every day at lunch I do a sudoku puzzle. But on one occasion last year I visited the "SuperBrightLEDs" website. If I type "su" superbrightLEDs is at the top of the list and I have to scroll down to find sudoku.

I am a member of several groups at delphiforums.com and visit there many times every day. About once a year I buy something from "DennisKirk.com". If I type "de" into the address bar denniskirk is the first suggestion and I have to scroll down to get the delphi forum.

In both of these cases, sites that were added to the history earlier, should occur first alphabetically, are visited -much- more often and have been bookmarked are preempted by rarely visited retail web sites. These are the two most noticeable examples but it does happen in other cases.

Is there a way of changing the order of suggestions?

Examples: Every day at lunch I do a sudoku puzzle. But on one occasion last year I visited the "SuperBrightLEDs" website. If I type "su" superbrightLEDs is at the top of the list and I have to scroll down to find sudoku. I am a member of several groups at delphiforums.com and visit there many times every day. About once a year I buy something from "DennisKirk.com". If I type "de" into the address bar denniskirk is the first suggestion and I have to scroll down to get the delphi forum. In both of these cases, sites that were added to the history earlier, should occur first alphabetically, are visited -much- more often and have been bookmarked are preempted by rarely visited retail web sites. These are the two most noticeable examples but it does happen in other cases. Is there a way of changing the order of suggestions?

All Replies (5)

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Next time use more letters, like; sudoku. Dennis, delphi, and so on.

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Obviously more letters will narrow the criteria but that does not answer my question. Why is it -necessary- to type additional letters to exclude rarely visited retail sites. Isn't frequency of visits or most recently visited a more useful sort criteria?

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If you like math... check out this article: The Places frecency algorithm | MDN.

To see whether you have any non-default weightings, or to adjust them, you can access them as follows:

(1) In a new tab, type or paste about:config in the address bar and press Enter. Click the button promising to be careful.

(2) In the filter box, type or paste frec and pause while the list is filtered

Any modified values will be bolded. If things go terribly wrong, right-click>Reset should get you back to default.

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You may also be interested in this you can for instance just add an asterisk when you type su or de and the results are then restricted to bookmrke addresses.

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You can consider to bookmark that site and add a keyword to that bookmark if you visit the site that often.
You can do that in the Bookmarks Manager (Library) if you click the More button at the bottom of the right pane after selecting that bookmark.