Search terms are being merged despite the fact that I searched them on different sites

Question

I have encountered a search issue which causes the terms to merge with other q2a sites.

Have a look at this,

I have first searched for the term Blobs on this site.

Later on when I went to search for Partition on systemrequest.net (which was build with q2a), i found that the term Blobs is also shown in the search list though I haven't searched for the term on the site.

And then when I return back to Q2A, I find both the terms: the one I searched on q2a and systemrequest being listed here too.

Is there something to do with the cookies?

Ansgar, Have you noticed this before?

Answer 1

What you've observed is a browser feature called form autocompletion. I just checked and see the same behavior. For Firefox some details on autocompletion and how to handle it can be found here, I assume that similar documentation exists for other browsers as well.

Why the browser provides the same suggestions for both sites I do not know. I would have expected the suggestions to be discriminated by site, but that doesn't appear to be the case. Instead browsers seem to resort to "educated guesses" when identifying a form field. Presumably the same software (and thus very similar page structures) being used on both sites makes the browser recognize the search form on both sites as the same.

Comments

great. Thank you for the info.

However, a possible solution that I tried was to change all functions and classes from "qa" to "pc" and the issue doesn't seem to occur anymore.

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I'm just speculating here, but if CSS class names are part of the browsers heuristics for identifying forms, changing class names could make the difference.