When history and bookmarks are enabled for autocomplete results, matching bookmarks are (typically) "displaced" by history entries given that there are often many matching history entries. To me, it seems that it would make sense to display bookmarks before history entries because there are likely to be fewer matches and they are likely to be more relevant. Limiting the number of history matches and always displaying bookmark matches would help as well regardless of the prioritization.
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Prioritize bookmarks before history in autocomplete results
Vlad added the Clarification tag .
Vlad Here's a simple example. I have https://orionfeedback.org/t/desktop bookmarked. When I type "orion" into the address bar hoping to be able to select the bookmark, the results look like this...
I have probably 2 matching bookmarks, but many, many history entries that mach. The bookmarks will never show in the results.
Here's the same example with all the autocomplete suggestion types enabled...
It seems bookmark matches should show regardless of the number of matches against the other suggestion types.
Additionally, my personal opinion, is that bookmark matches should fall between tab matches and search suggestions in the vertical hierarchy. Not only will there almost always be fewer bookmark matches, I would argue that they are probably more relevant than suggestions and history.
I'm sure that others would feel differently about the prioritization of the groups -- and I can see the argument for search suggestions being more relevant to some ... but not history 
-- but I don't think always at least showing the bookmark matches would ever be worse for anyone.
danderson It looks like there is currently a bug where bookmakrs are not surfacing at all if there are history entries. But let's imagine they do. Here I have only my bookmarks showing in autocomplete and I type orion. These are all that show: some match title some match url. Now imagine you have all these in addition to your history. What do you show?
Vlad I think you clearly want to limit the number of autocomplete suggestions. How to go about doing that is the question.
The simple way would be to limit the number of any given type. I would expect that different types would have different limits -- more for history, fewer for other types. Something along the lines of the following max number matches each type of: 2 top hits, 3 tabs, 3 bookmarks, 4 search suggestions, 6 history. Just throwing numbers out there. That may be too many.
Another approach would be to set a maximum number of total autocomplete results across all types and then limit the number of each type such that there are never more than the total max and as even a distribution as possible across the types.
If, for example, the maximum total was configured to 15, I typed "orion", and matched 1 top hit, 2 tabs, 8 bookmarks, 10 search suggestions, and 20 history entries. I think the results could look something like...
Top Hits:
- Top hit #1
Tabs:
- Tab #1
- Tab #2
Bookmarks
- Bookmark #1
- Bookmark #2
- Bookmark #3
Search Suggestions:
- Suggestion #1
- Suggestion #2
- Suggestion #3
History:
- History #1
- History #2
- History #3
I actually think the simpler approach is the right one because, to me, having more than a small number of matches for a given type is not helpful for an autocomplete interface and I would just keep typing to narrow it down.
We will first make sure that bookmarks show up in results. We have plans to make more changes to the algorithm later.
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