New Search Sorting Makes Finding Websites Difficult
The presentation of search results in the new UI is significantly different from the old behavior, in that “Autofill Suggestions” and Favorites are prioritized over all other search results. This may be a welcome change for the 5 users who voted for the feature request “Search Within Current URI”, or for anybody who is searching for a specific account among a large number of accounts for the same website.
However, there is a reasonably large subset of Bitwarden users who use the browser extension as a bookmark manager, for whom the Search functionality is now significantly degraded. Previously, one could enter a partial search term (3-4 characters) until the desired item was visible in the search list, then click the Launch button.
For these users, false-positive search matches among the “Autofill Suggestions” and Favorites can now push down the “All Items” search results off the page, so that scrolling (or a much larger number of characters added to the search term) is required to find the relevant search result. It should be noted that when using the Search tool as a bookmark manager, the “Autofill Sugggestions” are never relevant, because the user’s intent is to launch a different website than the matching site.
Here is an example of how the most relevant search result has been pushed off the page by irrelevant items in the “Autofill Suggestions” and Favorites sections:
It seems that the new behavior will be beneficial only to a niche subset of users (MSPs, developers, etc.) who may have large numbers of accounts matching the same website, and then use the search function to find a specific login account for the currently loaded website. Therefore, I would suggest that the new search behavior should be an option that such users can enable, not a fixed behavior that is imposed on users who do not need it.
In fact, there could be a user-selectable option for how to sort search results:
- Alphabetical sorting.
- By most recently used.
- Okapi BM25 (Lunr’s default sort order).
- Prioritize autofill suggestions and favorites.