What is Direct Match?
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Direct Match is a feature that allows you to access certain websites quickly from the Address Field, Search Field, and Speed Dial search. When there is a match, it saves you some clicks to access the intended site compared to going through your search engine of choice.
In the Address Field drop-down menu, the order of different items (Bookmarks, Search Suggestions, Direct Match, History, etc.) to be displayed can be customized like most other things in Vivaldi.
How does Direct Match work?
When you type a search term into the Address Field or into the Search Fields on the Address Bar and Speed Dial, Vivaldi looks up if there is a match with the word you typed in locally stored files. When found, Vivaldi displays the matched item in a dropdown menu labeled as Direct Match.
If you click on the direct match suggestion, it will bring you to a page and earns Vivaldi a small amount of revenue.
Note that as we start, our geographical coverage is limited to the United States. Thus, we have this feature only enabled by default for people who have Vivaldi configured to use the English(US) language. If everything goes well, we will expand the feature to more regions.
Privacy aspects
As with everything else in Vivaldi, Direct Match does not track you. It does not track what you type, and certainly will not be used for the purpose of behavioral profiling or similar activities that go against Vivaldi’s values. It responds only to what you type, without any kind of personalization of the results (except for the browser language).
Only a minimum amount of data goes to us and no identifying information is seen by anyone. This only happens when clicking a suggestion, otherwise, no data is exchanged.
In order to achieve this, we provide all the data necessary for matching locally in Vivaldi. Currently, it is provided as part of our package but we will likely change it to automatically fetch newer versions of this data instead and store it locally. This also means you can examine the data to get some idea of what goes on behind the scenes.
As long as you type in the Address Field or into the Search Fields on the Address Bar and Speed Dial, the only thing that happens is a lookup in those local files to find a corresponding click_url and target_url. A favicon for the suggestion is also obtained from a local store of images to avoid sending out any request that might hint about what you are typing. If you don’t click the sponsored link, nothing else happens.
If you choose to click the Direct Match suggestion, you will be directed to the target_url (which is just the URL that the suggestion points to). Meanwhile, a request will also be made to the click_url in the background. This is done to report to our partner that the suggestion was clicked. However, it is important to note that we are proxying all those click requests so that our partner has no way of knowing who clicked what. You can verify this by confirming that all click_url entries point to vivaldi.com
On our end, we have also taken precautions to avoid keeping any permanent record of who clicked what (notably, no IP address is kept). The corresponding details are highlighted in our Privacy Policy.
Why should I click on these suggestions?
With Direct Match, you get to access a page quickly that you intended to visit. At the same time, we hope that you will use those suggestions with the knowledge that you are financially helping us to continue providing a great browsing experience.
Disable Direct Match
To opt out of Direct Match: