No clean way to add a search engine that does nothing

[Majic]

I'm not sure if what I am reporting is what one would want to see on a bug tracker, this is more of a feature request. :>

My problem is that sometimes I like to disable searching from the address bar entirely. I know having things that are not urls default to being searched for is a convenience, but sometimes I just want to make sure that everything I type in the address bar cannot be interpreted as anything other than an address.

To do this I create a search engine with the address field reading: http://%s

This can still have an unintended affect as it might succeed sometimes if I managed to type <randomtext>.<validtld>

I wish I could have the address field just be %s, but this is not allowed for some reason. That way it would fail "naturally".

Or it would be nice if there were a preference option to disable searching in the address bar.

(Relatedly, the only time I have searching in the address bar enabled is because I can't tab-over to the Search Box like in Firefox)

Please make it so the address portion of Search Engines doesn't require the :// so you can just put %s at minimum, or make a preference option to disable searching with the address bar :>

Thank you.

[Cris Dywan (kalikiana)]

So I think %s by itself, even if strictly speaking a workaround, is more sensible here than a preference.
I'm arguing the same here as with completion: you may want to type " foo" instead of "foo" to prevent completion, when you still want completion most of the time and opening the preferences would be cumbersome.

Including input from IRC the following cases are possible:

name=nomagic
uri=%s

name=bogus
uri=google.com/search?q=%s

name=spanish
uri=%s&hl=es

name=table of contents
uri=%s#toc
name=top
uri=%s#top

The "nomagic" case is the one originally mentioned. It will never autocorrect anything.
The "bogus" case will never work. It probably shouldn't be allowed.
The "spanish" case could append arguments to the URL.
The "table of contents" and "top" cases would jump to common anchors.

Are there other cases? And, how do we specify when %s would be appended to the current URI?

I committed a change to allow a prefixed %s with no scheme, but it doesn't make the other cases work yet.

[gue5t gue5t (gue5t)]

Are we going to do something else with this? Released versions have prefix %s working as you described, and the only other idea mentioned is "use the current URI". In my opinion that would be best done with a different %-specifier, e.g. %u for "current page URI", which would be valid at the start like %s. But that seems outside the scope of this bug in particular, and of dubious utility.

[Launchpad Janitor (janitor)]

[Expired for Midori because there has been no activity for 60 days.]