in which net searching gets doubly disrupted

Internet searching is by no means a stable space.
Remember simple old Google?  Type in keyword, get a link?

Well now it's type in keyword, get suggested related searches, a link, a bunch of subpages of the link, and (sometimes) a site-specific search box.

As if that wasn't enough, along comes Firefox 3, with character matching in both URLs and page titles, when you type in the main URL bar.

Is Firefox 3 matching going to mean less searches sent to Google, as people navigate within their own set of URLs?  Is it going to change the page titles we use, so that we get better matches?  Why does it rank VALA ahead of ALA in the pattern match?

Comments

[Andrew Treloar]

The Firefox 3.0 autocompletion is based on web addresses in your history, as well as visited and bookmarked page titles and tags along with web addresses. So, VALA is coming up because you've visited it in the past.

This is different to the Firefox 'search from location bar' feature, which requires you to type a term and then hit return.

Thanks for your blog, BTW!

[Peter Murray]

Ah, the "AwesomeBar" ( http://www.dria.org/wordpress/archives/2008/04/17/628/ ): "the AwesomeBar will match what you’re typing (even multiple words!) against the URLs, page titles, and tags in your bookmarks and history, returning results sorted by 'frecency' (an algorithm combining frequency + recency)." I'd guess you visited the VALA site more recently than the ALA site, so that is why it was showing up first.

But to your point -- yes, this is another reason (in addition to search engine optimization reasons) for putting good TITLE tag information into HTML pages!