Forum Discussion
Policy needed: "Go to an intranet site for a one-word entry in the Address bar"
For enterprise a policy like the one in IE called "Go to an intranet site for a one-word entry in the Address bar" is very needed.
As an enterprise we have a lot of intranet sites and services using one-word hostnames and abreviations like "mc", "servicedesk" etc. that our users are used to just being able to type in their browser.
In Edge that will just launch a search on Google or Bing instead. Teaching the users to type http:// every time is nearly impossible and not very user friendly.
We use the policy in IE, but it sadly never came to Edge. It would be great if it could be added to the new Edge (Chromium) admx.
Thank you, ToMMeR, stesch79 and paf_skov for your feedback. I can appreciate those circumstances and your request.
We will look into adding a policy to make single-word queries navigate and I'll follow up on this thread with an update as soon as I have one.
Thanks again for giving us this important feedback and for describing your specific scenarios! It helps!Jared
- JaredB81
Microsoft
Thank you, ToMMeR, stesch79 and paf_skov for your feedback. I can appreciate those circumstances and your request.
We will look into adding a policy to make single-word queries navigate and I'll follow up on this thread with an update as soon as I have one.
Thanks again for giving us this important feedback and for describing your specific scenarios! It helps!Jared
- JaredB81
Hello @ToMMeR, @stesch79 @paf_skov and AngelPRU,
Thank you for your patience and for the additional responses.
In the today's Canary build, the policy GoToIntranetSiteForSingleWordEntryInAddressBar is now available for you to try out. Using gpedit.msc, you can find the policy under Computer Configuration > Administrative Templates > Microsoft Edge and it's Setting title reads, "Forces direct intranet site navigation instead of searching on single word entries in the Address Bar".
Please test this out in your environments and let us know if this meets your needs. I'm particularly interested in feedback on the following:- Does this policy satisfy the requirement originally stated in this thread? If not, how can we improve it?
- How does this policy interact with the other policies you enforce (for example, if you disable the default search provider or if you force deletion of history on exit as described).
- How your organization members respond to having this policy applied when they attempt to search for single-word entries or navigate to external websites with single-word domains (in environments where the default search provider is permitted and firewalls permit access to such domains).
Of course, I'd love to hear any other feedback you have related to this policy as well.
On behalf of the Microsoft Edge team, thank you!Jared
Do you know what version of the admin templates this new policy is available in? I just now downloaded the latest published, and I can't find that policy.
The one downloaded shows:
MAJOR=78
MINOR=0
BUILD=249
PATCH=1
- JaredB81
Thank you, ToMMeR for confirming the dot fix works as expected! I'm glad to hear it meets your needs.
@ToMMeR, @Aaron Roma, @Omega47, @AngelPRU, @paf_skov and @stesch79, as for the search fallback, I'm pleased to report that we have an implementation ready for you to test! It should be available in the latest Dev channel build (80.0.320.5).
Since the implementation is in such a complex area of our codebase, we have put the fallback behind a command-line feature flag until we have sufficient test coverage to conclude it is behaving as expected, without any unintended consequences.To test the search fallback, in addition to enabling the policy, please edit your shortcut for Edge Dev to include the feature flag.
Here are instructions:
- Right-click on the taskbar shortcut
- Right-click on the “Microsoft Edge Dev” item in the context menu which appears after step #1
- Click on “Properties” in the second context menu that appears
- In the “Target” field, please append “--enable-features=msAllowFallbackSearch” to “C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft\Edge Dev\Application\msedge.exe” such that the Target field looks like, “C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft\Edge Dev\Application\msedge.exe --enable-features=msAllowFallbackSearch”
Please update to the latest Dev channel build, apply the policy to go to an intranet site for single word entries, set the feature flag in your shortcut and launch Edge dev using that shortcut. You can then attempt to navigate to single word destinations that are not within your Intranets.
Please let us know how the fallback behavior works for you.
As always, thank you very much for your feedback!
Jared (and the entire Microsoft Edge Address Bar & Search Team)
JaredB81 Fantastic!
I have tested the implementation and it works as expected.
I have tried various combinations of single word entries, and entries with "." and "-".
If the word is not resolved in our DNS it instantly does as Google Search.If the word exists as a hostname in our DNS, but no web server responds to the request, then it also redirects to a Google Search after timing out (which takes about 20 seconds). This is of course quite a long time to wait, but I think it is acceptable as if the word exists as a hostname in DNS you are most likely trying to access that web server and not search for the word.
I will continue to run on the this Edge Dev version with the feature enabled and let you know if i stumble upon anything unexpected. But I think it works as wished 🙂
Thank you for implementing this feature.
- JaredB81
Thank you, ToMMeR, for testing our implementation and for confirming this policy now meets your needs, end-to-end, for your organization.
We will continue to monitor feedback from other members of the community and I would love to hear how others on this thread find the experience once they have done similar testing.
We will also continue to conduct internal testing to make sure navigating and searching work seamlessly when this policy is enabled. Once we have completed our testing and have heard from anyone else from the community who is testing the policy with the search fallback command-line flag enabled, we will remove the requirement to set the command-line flag. I’ll post an update on this thread when that takes place.
Finally, ToMMeR, I would be remiss as a member of the Address Bar and Search team to respond to your post without suggesting that you give Bing a try :-). Particularly with the new Microsoft Search in Edge feature which is designed to help members of your organization be even more productive, but with Bing relevance and performance improvements in general, we are working hard to make Bing the very best search experience in Microsoft Edge! Please give it a try – I’d love feedback on how Bing works for you as well :-).
Thanks very much,
Jared on behalf of the entire Address Bar and Search Team
- JaredB81
ToMMeR thank you for your feedback!
You are correct that Edge will perform a search on the single-word entry that omits the https:// prefix the first time, however once the user visits the intranet site, subsequent entries of the same text will auto-complete to the history entry and therefore perform a direct navigation to the intranet site.
I do hear your request for a policy to allow organizations to override the behavior I described and we are happy to consider that approach, however one thing that's important to note is that it will make it much more difficult for non-intranet, single-word query terms to be searched by users of any organization that enables such a policy should it be implemented.
Instead of conducting a search, all single-word queries would attempt to internally navigate and so any queries that don't match an intranet site would fail instead of search.
Please let us know if the current behavior which I described (relying on history entries for direct navigation to intranet sites), is sufficient for you, or if a policy is still important to you.Thanks again for your feedback!
Jared
JaredB81 Thank you for your quick reply.
Although the auto-complete from the history navigating to the intranet site is a nice feature, it is not sufficient to satisfy our needs.
It is a big inconvenience if thousands of users have to learn to type in http://hostname or https://hostname the first time they visit each of the many intranet sites we have in our organisation.
It will cause many support cases to our service desk as our users does not understand why it doesn't work. Of course over time as the users visit each intranet site the problem decreases. But that is only until they get their pc reinstalled, get a new pc, get their history deleted etc. plus everytime we implement a new intranet site with a new hostname they have to do it all over for that website.
We have tried to get our users to use the current Edge version instead of IE on their pc's but many still use IE as their default simply because they get irritated that they cannot access our intranet sites without ending on Bing or Google.
We still need a Group Policy like the one that existed in Internet Explorer where we can choose if we want single word entries to go to intranet sites instead of doing a search.
In IE when typing a single word that does not resolve internally it does still fall back to a Bing/Google search, it just takes longer as it waits for the intranet request to time out before doing a Search.
JaredB81 We also look forward for such a policy. Your suggestion is not suffiecient in our environment, as we delete all browser history on browser close, due to security reasons. Our users are anyway not allowed to use the Edge address bar for internet search.
But, it would be great to have the same behaviour as in MSIE. If the URL can be resolved internally, it forwards to intranet. If not, then a search engine shall be addressed.
JaredB81- As the new Edge will replace and emulate IE for enterprises, it must respect the same GPO settings, including this one. Many enterprises use single-word names, for example, "intra" in our case.
Because it falls back to sending the word to the search engine if no host replies, it is not a problem, and something users have been used to for decades.
Peter 🙂
- GoToIntranetSiteForSingleWordEntryInAddressBar-GPO seems to bee broken since version 90. One word search is routed to Google/Bing immediately - intranet server isn't found anymore.
- Kelly_Y
ThiloLangbein Hello! I see an update/fix was made for the GoToIntranetSiteForSingleWordEntryInAddressBar policy in MS Edge versions 92.0.873.0+. I believe we are working on releasing to other Channels as well. Thanks!
-Kelly
- Yes, 92.x brings back this functionality.
Kelly_Y
An affected user noticed recently that the documentation for this policy still refers exclusively to a single word without punctuation even though it was extended to accept both hyphens and dots. Is this intentional? I can imagine why it might be, so I haven't submitted feedback about the discrepancy.- Kelly_Y
Noel Burgess Hi! Jared is no longer with the team so I'll check who would be able to help and take a look at the policy description. Thanks!
-Kelly