We need a new string from UX/Content Stategy. We should be aware of l10n challenges.

This is covered in the most recent UX spec, linked in the metabug. I'm raising the priority since Product would like this address ASAP, although this doesn't block bug 1658326.

We're going to show "Enter search terms" as the placeholder unless the engine is a "general-purpose" search engine. In that case, we will show "Search the Web". General-purpose search engines include Google, Bing, DuckDuckGo, Yandex, and Baidu. Others could be added in the future.

Speaking with engineering, the best way to approach this would be to introduce a new static list of engine categories, including but not limited to:

• general
• travel
• products
• news
• knowledge
• code
• other

"other" will include any engine for which we can't determine a category, including OpenSearch engines and WebExtension engines (for now). In the future, we might want to allow WebExtensions to declare a category for their engine, especially once these categories do something useful.

Assigning a category to every built-in engine doesn't have to be a part of this bug. But introducing these categories now will help with vertical search work in the future. We will show the "Search the Web" placeholder string for any "general" category search engine.

Bug 1640054 also needs to store some new metadata for search engines, and I think we've settled on remote settings for it, although we discuss a few possibilities. But that might not easily fit into a scheme that allows random third-party engines to declare their categories. Anyway, I mention it so we're aware of that commonality.

This is the simplest possible way to fix this bug in the interest of landing
ASAP. It keeps a hardcoded list of engines that search the web.

https://treeherder.mozilla.org/#/jobs?repo=try&revision=83a5d7f9bf04a2f9b68e9c941151259c16a0c901

https://hg.mozilla.org/mozilla-central/rev/8a8bd5831171