How does URL matching work

markauk

Hi,



How does 1Password match URLs when figuring out which logins are relevant for a web site? For example, if I have a login for www2.site.co.uk/enter would it match any of the following:-



[url]www.site.com/login[/url]

[url]www.site.co.uk/login[/url]

www2.site.com/login

[url]www.site.com/enter[/url]

etc...



and how close does a URL have to be for it to be on the top level of the 1password menu, under "Fill Login" or under "Other logins" submenus?



Is it possible to have multiple URL's attached to a single login... for example some sites' login screens come under completely different URLs depending on how the login screen was accessed.



Is it possible to tell 1Password to always use a specific login for a specific URL (or part of URL) - e.g. always use this login for [url]www.site.com/service1/login[/url] and always use a different login for [url]www.site.com/service2/login?[/url]



I couldn't find any info about this in any 1Password documentation, but if it's there and I missed it just point me in the right direction.



Thanks,



mark.

jxpx777

Hi, Mark. You've asked a few different questions here so let me split it up and try to address each one.



[quote name='markauk']How does 1Password match URLs when figuring out which logins are relevant for a web site? For example, if I have a login for www2.site.co.uk/enter would it match any of the following:-



[url]www.site.com/login[/url]

[url]www.site.co.uk/login[/url]

www2.site.com/login

[url]www.site.com/enter[/url]

etc...[/quote]



What you're asking about here is precise url matching. The first thing to consider is that if the main domain of your login does not match the URL of the page that you're viewing, 1Password will not make the login available to you in the browser extension. For this purpose, TLDs like .com, .net, and .org and ccTLDs like .co.uk are all distinct. So, if you go to [anysubdomain.]site.co.uk[/anything] any login that has has its root in site.co.uk. site.com, site.net, etc. won't show up.



[quote]how close does a URL have to be for it to be on the top level of the 1password menu, under "Fill Login" or under "Other logins" submenus?[/quote]



So, now we get down to when multiple logins match the same TLD or ccTLD, we want the best match possible to be used. So, to extend your example, let's say that in addition to your www2.site.co.uk/enter login, you have a login stored with just www2.site.co.uk/other as the location and another with www3.site.co.uk/sekret as the location. Here's how 1Password sets about things. First it looks for all your logins that match the top level domain, site.co.uk in this example. If it finds exactly one, great! That one wins. If it finds more than one, it starts through a process of finding the best matches. If it finds exactly one best match, great! It uses that one and offers the others in Other Logins. If it finds multiple items that are tied for the best match, that's when you get the Fill Login > menu.



Here's an illustration by way of a couple of examples using my augmented list of logins (since if there's only one it's not an interesting question):



[list=1]

[*] I type www2.site.co.uk/enter in Safari's address bar and press return. 1Password looks through my logins and finds all my logins for site.co.uk, which is three now: www2.site.co.uk/enter, www2.site.co.uk, and www3.site.co.uk/sekret. In this case, the URL I have in my browser matches exactly one of my logins exactly, so that one is preferred.

[*] I go to just www2.site.co.uk. 1Password looks through my logins and discovers that there are two logins with www2.site.co.uk and there are no additional criteria on which to further guess a best match, so it offers them both.

[*] I go to www9.site.co.uk. 1Password looks through my logins and sees that I have three logins that are site.co.uk logins all with different subdomains. In this situation any of the site.co.uk logins might be the right one, so it offers all three

[/list]



I hope that helps clarify what I'm sure must seem nearly random without the long-winded explanation.



[quote]Is it possible to have multiple URL's attached to a single login... for example some sites' login screens come under completely different URLs depending on how the login screen was accessed.[/quote]



Right now there are a few equivalent domains that are hardcoded in 1Password. One example is agile.ws and agilewebsolutions.com. There is obviously no place that these domains are listed such as in a plist (We wouldn't want a Bad Guy to get into your system and change that plist to make paypal.com and gimmeallurmoney.com equivalent so that you're vulnerable to a phishing attack.), but we do want to make it possible to specify these equivalencies more easily. We just need to make sure that the way we implement this makes it the best experience possible.



[quote]Is it possible to tell 1Password to always use a specific login for a specific URL (or part of URL) - e.g. always use this login for [url]www.site.com/service1/login[/url] and always use a different login for [url]www.site.com/service2/login?[/url][/quote]



It's not possible to explicitly denote a login as default, but you can exploit the precise url matching to get one to bubble up to the top. So, for instance, if I have the three logins from our example above and I want to always use www2.site.co.uk/enter, I would change the other www2.site.co.uk login to be [i]less[/i] specific. You would want to do the same for all the logins except the default one. I recently did this with my Apple ID and my developer program accounts. I set my Apple ID to simply [url]www.apple.com[/url] and my developer program account to daw.apple.com. This way, every time I'm logging into the developer account, it's used right away but I can still log into my Apple ID account from the other non-daw login pages.



[quote]I couldn't find any info about this in any 1Password documentation, but if it's there and I missed it just point me in the right direction.[/QUOTE]



No, you're right. This is something that needs to be improved in the documentation and we can also improve the experience as well. (Hopefully this long-winded explanation will be a good jumping off point.) We do plan to bring a UI for specifying equivalent domains, but right now I don't have a timeframe to share for when this might happen. Please let us know if you have any other questions.

markauk

Jamie - thank you for a very complete answer - it would be great to have something like this in the documentation!



Thinking about this more now that I understand better how 1P is doing things, maybe all you need is the ability to add multiple URLs to a login. Equivalent domains would be a (great) start, and certainly help with cases where site.com and site.co.uk are essentially equivalent. However, there are cases (Citibank comes to mind) where there are many different login routes and nothing in the URL (domain or path) bears any relation to other login pages...



I look forward to seeing how you sort this out... your UI decisions always show lots of thought and foresight.

MartyS

Thanks for the words of encouragement! We'll see if we can get something like this into the on-line documentation in the future.

diniscorreia

Hello there,



I was just wondering on this issue - and I was also looking on the documentation <img src='http://forum.agile.ws/public/style_emoticons/<#EMO_DIR#>/smile.gif' class='bbc_emoticon' alt=':)' />



The Apple case you mention if exactly one of the things I was trying to, well, unify. My only remaining doubt is: should it really be www.apple.com on the login URL? Or can it just be apple.com? Some logins URLs at Apple's site have an auth. sub-domain - so I'm just curious on this one.



Thanks a lot!

dave8118

I just wanted to add my voice to those asking for a straightforward way to manage url matching (and, in the interim at least, for some easy-to-find documentation on this aspect of things). As a grad student, I have many different myschool.edu logins, and it would be nice to easily manage which ones get used in which case, instead of having to select from a huge dropdown menu all the time.



My main pointL I'm sure many college students and professors use 1password, and I'm sure many of them have this issue.

[Deleted User]

[quote name='dave8118' timestamp='1285089949' post='11703']

I just wanted to add my voice to those asking for a straightforward way to manage url matching (and, in the interim at least, for some easy-to-find documentation on this aspect of things). As a grad student, I have many different myschool.edu logins, and it would be nice to easily manage which ones get used in which case, instead of having to select from a huge dropdown menu all the time.



My main pointL I'm sure many college students and professors use 1password, and I'm sure many of them have this issue.

[/quote]



We're certainly listening to everyone's votes for this, it's something we're really keen to improve within 1Password. As we're a fairly small team with limited resources we try not to give timeframes on when new features will be coming, but that doesn't mean we don't love to hear your feedback.