Safari Autocomplete Gets Suddenly "Creative"

[jordii]

I start typing into the URL field and Safari's autocomplete slickly recognizes the frequently visited site I'm calling for. Voila. 21st century life is beautiful.

All's well for weeks or months. Then, suddenly, autocomplete pretends it's never heard of the site, and pulls some obscure site out of my bookmarks, or one that's not even in my bookmarks or history.

I hastily nuke the logged item in History to discourage repeats, but I can never resume my nice easy autocomplete flow. Only solution is to reset Safari and start from scratch. And sometimes it trains well (and works well for a while until the cycle repeats), and sometimes it never learns and I need to reset again.

This happens on Mac and Mobile, both.

Anyone else have this?

 

[casperes1996]

Nope. Works perfectly for me at all times.

 

[jordii]

I imagine you posting that 14,000 times per day. You must be exhausted.

 

[brianmowrey]

In Safari Prefs > Search > Smart Search, you can play around with what is clicked

If you un-click Favorites and Quick Website Search that should prevent anything you hardly visit from being scored higher than the things you visit a lot. Or not.

 

[jordii]

In Safari Prefs > Search > Smart Search, you can play around with what is clicked

If you un-click Favorites and Quick Website Search that should prevent anything you hardly visit from being scored higher than the things you visit a lot. Or not.

I'm talking about autocomplete, not search.

Autocomplete is when you start typing a URL or web site name in the URL field and it autocompletes to the most visited site matching the text you've typed.....except when it suddenly forgets and starts suggesting random sites, pretending it's never been asked to go to the site you go to all the time.

For example, if I type "Twit" in the URL field, it's smart enough to know I want Twitter.com. But at some point, it's going to start mindlessly completing to, say, Twits.tumbler.com. Or Twitterdownloader.com. Or some internal page in Twitter I randomly visited once last week.

 

[casperes1996]

I'm talking about autocomplete, not search.

Autocomplete is when you start typing a URL or web site name in the URL field and it autocompletes to the most visited site matching the text you've typed.....except when it suddenly forgets and starts suggesting random sites, pretending it's never been asked to go to the site you go to all the time.

For example, if I type "Twit" in the URL field, it's smart enough to know I want Twitter.com. But at some point, it's going to mindlessly complete to, say, Twits.tumbler.com. Or Twitterdownloader.com. Or some internal page in Twitter I randomly visited once last week.

That's also what the person you're replying to is talking about - The "URL field" is the Smart Search field

 

[brianmowrey]

right, “Smart Search“ is just Safari-speak for url bar auto-complete. It’s also basically just Safari Spotlight.

I havent pored into any documentation, but my basic intuition is that Safari is assigning scores to items in history, favorites, and this weird list of sites you have ever used COMD-F in, and things with high enough scores fill in above the Google auto-complete suggestions. In that case your issue would be things in Favorites or Quick Website list being scored too high or some extremely weird bug where low scores outcompete really, really high scores.

I don’t imagine it’s an issue with the “Safari Suggestions“ item in that list, since that one is actually for Siri suggestions and would not pull from Favorites.

Personally I have Favorites off, because if I am not using something regularly in Favorites I probably need to browse for it to even remember what it’s called

 

[jordii]

Ok, yep, got it. It might not be a solution, but narrowing the pool of how Safari makes these suggestions would surely help at least some.