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Why "Yahoo" Is The #1 Search Term On Google
An anonymous reader writes "Google Trends indicates that over the course of the past year the search term "Yahoo" became more popular than "sex", making it the #1 query on Google. Yahoo apparently faces a similar dilemma with roles reversed: When you search for "Google" on Yahoo, Yahoo thoughtfully displays a second search box as if to tell you, "Hey cutie, you have a search engine right in front of you!" A puzzling phenomenon? An strange aberration?"
Well you wouldn't phone up Microsoft and ask for details on the best Linux distrobution would you?
If you write it it will come.
Hands up how many people went between google and yahoo trying these searches?
liqbase
...where does "first post" rank?
SELECT quote.text AS sig FROM quote NATURAL JOIN attribute WHERE attribute.description = 'witty';
0 rows returned
So how many of you just went to Google and searched for Yahoo? How many of you just went to Yahoo and searched for Google?
People is using "pr0n" to search for that stuff.
Thanks to slashdot, of course.
Ask Jeeves, maybe he knows?
Maybe people just Feel Lucky with their brand new Firefoxes and hit enter without the dotcom.
If I was google, I'd make a huge splash saying "You're feeling funny. Ha ha." after looking up "yahoo".
Yahoo! will display that box for any search engine, try "msn search" or "ask.com" and I personally wouldn't use the words "thoughtful" or "cutsie" to describe it. It's just selective advertising. And--like nearly all forms of advertising--I hate it.
Considering that www.yahoo.com takes about 5,000k more memory than www.google.com in my Firefox browser, it's obvious to me which one I use by default. Now with the search box in the upper right being able to link to either of them, I still find that Yahoo!'s returned results has a larger memory footprint than Google's.
My work here is dung.
Even if we all try that (I did), there's no way we could slashdot those pages.
Move along, nothing to crash there...
It does for me. In place of the ads there's the text "Search the Web with Yahoo!" and a second search box. Kind of nice that Google doesn't feel the need to resort to that, thought it's not really bothersome since it only takes the place of ads.
http://www.gahooyoogle.com/
Politics is Treachery, Religion is Brainwashing
I would imagine it's because a HUGE population out there just doesn't understand or care what a "default page" is, how to change it, or that someone (or some kitty'n'virus download executable) left their computer with such a page as the default. They know they want to "look it up on the Googles" so they get to it by typing google in the "slot" or "address bar" that's right there in the middle of the screen every time they launch "the Internet."
[
Not at all. A lot of people don't know the difference between an address bar and a "search box." They type where they want to go into whatever is handy, and the browser (eventually) takes them there. I've seen more than one person start up their browser and type full URLs into search engines. Attempts to "correct" them are futile because what they are doing gets them what they want.
Rather than type in "http:///www.yahoo.com", it can be simpler to type in "yahoo" into a google search text box, hit return, and click on the appropriate link from google's results.
Mea navis aericumbens anguillis abundat
Everyone seems to assume when looking at the search terms that people are being stupid and actually searching for a search engine. This is not always the case. For instance, while Google is getting better at this, they have not always been good at providing links to their various services. For the longest time, I knew of no way to get to a direct link to Google Analytics, thus if I was on a computer that I didn't have bookmarks, I would simply search for "google analytics" which gave me the results I needed. Both google and Yahoo are used for much more than as a search engine. Add to this that they are also both in the news a fair amount and people may want to find information about some news development. Don't be too quick to assume the reason for people making searches, particularly when you don't know the full search string that they used.
j.goforth
People don't know or care to set one or the other as their start page and are finding their favorite via the default on their computers.
Back in the days when there were not a whole slew of service providers available, AOL was one of the few with easy access and local dial-up numbers. (Am I dating myself yet?) And back in my AOL days before it became the bane of the Internet, the portal features allowed one to type in a "keyword" which would then take you to a web page that was associated with that keyword. However, you did not leave thier portal and never really hit the actual webpage because the portal seemed to cache the most popular sites to improve performance on slow dial-up (we're talking 14.4 modems, not even a 33.6). Now, in the present days of accessible broadband, many people are jumping to the fatser connections and being forced to abandon the AOL dial-up services they came to know, love and abuse.
Due to this phenomena, it seems that many people are inadvertantly using the search features of newer browsers to type in keywords and get the page they are looking for immediatly. The search engines are shooting themselves in the foot by adding the Google and Yahoo toolbars and making this ability accessible to users. What's worse is that with these toolbars in the browsers, even if the page is cached, unlike how AOL's portal used to operate, every time the ENTER button is pressed, it hits the search engine. Since computers have become more accessible to the general public and arguably more intuitive to use (even Windows) there are many people who know only a world like AOL. This limited knowledge leads to poor behavior on the actual Internet. Since more of these AOL'ers are tearing off the AOL portal training wheels, they are hitting the real Internet in droves and using bad habits propogated by AOL's effort to preserve a competative advantage in thier portal.
Apparently, many people still don't use the address bar to go to websites. They actually type addresses or the second-level domain name in the search engine that happens to be the default home page. My mother-in-law has a HP-Compaq laptop that had yahoo.com as her default home page. SO, if someone buys a computer where yahoo.com is default, but they prefer to use google, they simply type google in the search box to get to google.com. My mom does something similar. She doesn't remember URLs, she relies solely on the default home page search to navigate the internet.
I blows my mind that after all these years, people still do this.
I also do the same for /. too.
Damn, why not slashdot top the google #1 search result?
Fellow geeks, please type it harder on google to bring /. top!
(I tried "/." on google box too, why it bring me to a blank page instead of /.?)
At work, where I am forced to use Windows and IE, if you make a mistake on the address bar, you go to the Error/MSN search page, rather than a blank page like on another browser. Typing into the Google bar avoids the Big Brother Microsoft aspect of that, and gets you one click away from your site on Google.
Or people are just lazy. That ".com" can take a lot out of you.
The reason Google is successful, is that they understand the needs of their audience and they cater to them. Yahoo has never allowed anyone to correct their business model, which is why Google exists today.
The dangers of knowledge trigger emotional distress in human beings.
New users can't tell the difference between the URL box at the top of the browser and the search box at the top of search engine pages. At a previous web dev job we had a customer that did the same thing, that one was fun to troubleshoot.
People have already commented on the fact that it's "mindblowing" to them that the average computer user can't differentiate between the address bar and a search box, not to mention that they don't remember or use URLs. I think that's a bit of an elitist, naive view of the overwhelming majority of internet users. Side-stepping the (woefully draining) topic of "why isn't Aunt Ruth more adept at computing?", people googling for yahoo is no different than dialing 411 to get an operator to look up a phone number and make a connection for you. Sometimes it makes sense.
Sometimes you're driving and can't safely get out the yellow pages (or yellowpages.com) to look up a number and call it.
Sometimes you're on a device with limited typing capabilities and can't be bothered to type "http://" with 9 keys.
Sometimes you don't know what "http://" even means, let alone are skilled enough at typing to quickly knock in "http://www.google.com" when "google" is already strenuous enough and all you wanted in the first place.
I know, it's 2007. People should learn and adapt. I get it. That's my gut reaction too, but then again, tell that to my grandma who has never driven a day in her life because back when she could've learned, it wasn't necessary or (apparently) proper for women to have a driver's license or a car. As weird as it seems in today's society, it hasn't stopped her from living a full life.
-Rylfaeth
That was Steve Jobs' dream, after all and I'm on board myself. I drank the Apple Kool-Aid back in '79.
Not the Grape, but the Apple Kool-Aid ...get it! A triple meaning there!
that the grass is always greener on the other side of the fence
A lot of people simply don't care to learn the difference between the search box and the address bar. "If I type what I want into this box here, I sometimes get a strange error message. But if I type it into that box there, then I get what I want. Therefore, I'll use that box there for everything." And you know what? It doesn't bother me that they don't care. In fact, I think it's good that they don't care. Computers should adapt to people, not the other way around.
/ 27/1160055.aspx
http://blogs.msdn.com/oldnewthing/archive/2006/11
there can be no doubt, this must be very embarassing for Google:-).
The Canadian Yahoo site doesn't use the same trick. Try it.
Blerg.
http://www.google.com/
- 501&toggle=1&cop=mss&ei=UTF-8
IE6: 15,524k
http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=testing
IE6: 15,896k
http://www.yahoo.com/
IE6: 29,492k
http://search.yahoo.com/search?p=testing&fr=yfp-t
IE6: 25,848k
I don't want this to be a browser war, I want this to be an analysis of these search engines. In IE6, Yahoo fares even worse. The ratio ranges from 1:2 on the homepage to 3:5 on a random search.
My work here is dung.
"Quick, give me the number for 9-1-1!"
I recently created a website for a medium sized driving and instructor training school. I have to say, this does not surprise me one bit. When the site went live, the owner of the company phoned me up quite paniced, saying that he was getting between 5-10 phone calls per day telling him that "the site doesnt exist" or "i cant find the site" when users tried to enter the url. I realised straight away what must have been going on - as a new site, it hadn't been indexed by Google or any other search engines yet, and obviously people were typing in the full url into Google etc.
I explained this to him, and from the explanation it took, it seemed that he himself had been doing the same (during email correspondence and such I had always provided him with links to click). The end result of the conversation? "Get our site on Google now!" When I explained to him that this couldn't be done instantly, we went with the sponsored ad option, which now does the job fine. Although he has to pay for users incompetencies, it does of course help with traffic.
It really is an alien concept to me that in 2007 a huge (perhaps the majority?) percentage of internet users do not understand what the address bar is, and how it differs from a search engine. I can see how this may have come about, I guess, but even if I try to be as empathetic as possible and place myself right in Joe Bloggs' shoes, I still have a massive problem swallowing it. I've been driving for a little over 2 years now, and you better believe I know how the handbrake differs from the footbrake. I realise the faults with that analogy, but that is genuinly how I feel about this. Something needs to be done, I'm not entirely sure what, but in an age where the internet is such an integral part of a lot of the worlds life this seems like a major issue.
I once found a page telling bad things about google and firefox. One week later google wouldnt find it anyhow. So I tried yahoo and there it was, on first page search. Guess you gotta use yahoo to have an impartial (prolly maybe not) search about the enemy and vice versa.
To
I wonder how much slashdoters will try a search of yahoo on google et vice-versa! :-)
:-P
Let's post a news that say : "Search 20 times the word ABSURD and you will see an hidden message". I bet this word will be in the top 10 in no time
I reconfigured their Internet Explorer so they had their address bar back. Tomorrow I might teach them how to change their home page.
Zen tips: Pay attention. Don't take it personally. Believe nothing.
My blog
Since many people have been making fun of me for posting this, I'm going to go ahead and point out that soon one of the most common computers in the world will be the OLPC. Now, my parents are still stuck on a phone line so when I visit them I use Google. And I definitely see a difference. I suspect that the people using OLPCs will be using simply the search engine that is fastest for them. They will have low bandwidth & little, slow memory.
So, yeah, I think my initial argument was valid. Now, you might say that they don't want people with no money using their search engines (what ads will they click?) or that these people will probably speak Swahili or another non-English language, but I contend that having the traffic will reflect your market share. And in the end, the image as "the penultimate search engine" is the only thing that matters to these guys.
My work here is dung.
..."htpp://www.autodesk.com is MEANINGLESS, you imbecile! You typed it WRONG!"... Actually, while it's not entirely meaningless, you *did* type it wrong.When you type in a partial URL, FF automatically does a search using your default search engine.
Excuse me, but please get off my Pennisetum Clandestinum, eh!
Well, here is the whole shitload: http://www.dogpile.com/
Excuse me, but please get off my Pennisetum Clandestinum, eh!
Try typing in 'yahoo' (without the quotes) in firefox URL bar. It takes you to google and then to yahoo. Put simply, it performed an I'm feeling lucky search on google. I do this _all_ the time, not for yahoo but for stuff like 'yahoo mail' or 'yahoo finance' and so on.
When you search for "Google" on Yahoo, Yahoo thoughtfully displays a second search box as if to tell you, "Hey cutie, you have a search engine right in front of you!" A puzzling phenomenon? An strange aberration?"
Well that sentence there just made thousands more nerds go boost the search term "google" farther up the list and away from "sex"!
I do find this article funny since there was an article (or maybe it was just some comments) recently talking about how a large majority of people will type "yahoo" or "google" into their search engine of choice instead of typing "www.google.com" or "www.yahoo.com" into the address bar.
Hey, there is only one Return and it's not of the King, it's of the Jedi.
I agree with the rest of your post, though.
Still trying to think of a clever sig...
It's the same philosophy that has resulted in bloated operating systems and applications. Everyone assumes that memory and bandwidth are cheap, so the don't bother optimizing their code. Then these same people bitch about how bloated an application is. Certainly would be nice for people to engage the brain once and a while. Yeah, I am sure my karma will take a hit for telling people the ugly truth.
http://www.google.com/trends?q=slashdot%2C+sex&cta b=0&geo=all&date=all
There is only one inescapable conclusion. Slashdot is very easy to find. So nobody is searching for it. Sex is very hard to find. So they keep searching for it. Right?
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
I rarely use Yahoo, their homepage is a big mess, and seems to have been redesigned every time I look at it. Add to that the different local varieties of Yahoo (sometimes I want the .co.uk version, being British), and the fact that their "Adult groups" are deliberately not indexed at all, then I feel quite justified in Googling for a Yahoo page rather than fighting my way through Yahoo's menus to find it, it's the quickest way to get to it.
A pizza of radius z and thickness a has a volume of pi z z a
Want to improve your Karma? Instead of "Post Anonymously", try the "Post Humously" option.
Searching for Yahoo on Yahoo, I got "Also try: ". Doing the same thing for Google, I got "Also try: ". I smell something fishy.
Perhaps one day we will have a single unified search engine, not driven by commercial interests, rather driven by lazy "global government" employees.
-- if you mod me down, I will become more powerful than you can possibly imagine
This is probably old news around here, but I have gotten into the habit of typing shorthand into Firefox's into the site/url text field to go to sites. In some versions this does the equivalent of "I'm feeling lucky" others just does a google search (probably configurable). Anyways typing: "imdb star wars" takes me to star wars on imdb, "yahoo" takes me to yahoo.com, slashdot takes me to slashdot.org, and "wikipedia {put anthing here}" takes me to the appropriate wikipedia page. Given this, I could see lots of Yahoo searches on Google, when everyone knows perfectly well what and where Yahoo is.
Laboratree - Scientific collaboration based on OpenSocial.
By default, the URL address bar in Firefox uses Google for exact text search. That means, if a word is written there without the dots, "yahoo" instead of "yahoo.com", it defaults to parsing, doing a search in google.com, selecting the first site it finds, and opening this site. I think other browsers do the same.
Also, sometimes people type in the address bar instead of typing in the search bar.
It just means that besides Google, Yahoo is the first most used site, in average.
I wonder if Yahoo could be sued if Yahoo were to return advertising results with a link to Yahoo when a user searched the YPN for Google? They don't show any ads as it is? Shouldn't there at least be some SEO spam in there?
For some reason I refuse to use either spell check or the spacebar properly.
http://www.google.com/trends?q=download%2C+yahoo%2 C+A%2C+&ctab=0&geo=all&date=all/ (click search if not work), and yes, I spent a ridiculous amount of time on trends.
Once again, you made the common /. mistake when comparing Yahoo! to Google.
http://www.yahoo.com/ is the Yahoo! web portal. If you're going to comapre that to something on Google, compare it to http://www.google.com/ig, which is the Google portal (actually http://www.google.com/ig is more like http://my.yahoo.com/ but anyways...)
http://search.yahoo.com/ is the Yahoo! search page.
These are *NOT* the same thing. The reason the search page isn't the default at Yahoo's WWW domain, is because their primary market is not as a search engine, it is as a web portal.
"penultimate" means (roughly) "next-to-last", or "next-to-greatest". I think you just meant "ultimate".
Research is what I'm doing when I don't know what I'm doing. -- Wernher von Braun
That makes one wonder: do we really need to have two different boxes?
Patrick Doyle
I mod down every jackass who puts his moderation policy in his sig. Oh, wait a sec....
Readers are asked to note that whilst Yahoo! is now more popular than sex, it is neither better nor safer - the likelyhood of viral infection remains high with both pastimes and a personal firewall should be worn for the duration of any connection.
boakes.org
i actually use google to search for yahoo stuff frequently. i don't know if it is just the differences in the search algorithm or the way they categorize or group stuff...but sometimes i just can't find stuff from the yahoo search that i know is there...so i google it.
it works to. i guess it just goes to show...you don't need to know yourself to be true to it...you just need to google it!
People dont know the difference between the location input control, and the search input control. More than half the users I've seen, will type www.whatever.com in the search input, not understanding what they are doing.
I'm not sure what the remedy is here. There's an obvious difference between submitting a query, and typing a location, but the difference is clouded for the end user, because the search engines still display a result.
Perhaps that engines should stop responding to searches that contain fqdns? Like that's going to work... Perhaps the location bar should just merge with the search bar, and if the whatever you type is a valid web page, then the browser puts a link at the very tippy top of the list of results, and also displays the results from your favorite engine.
I dunno...
Search for "MSN Search" and "ask" on Yahoo shows the second search box too.
Hey
sometimes i accidentally search on google for the word "google"... google is my default search in ie7 and sometimes in a drunken stupor i type "http://google" and internet explorer then realizes this isnt a domain so sends it to my default search engine so the page that follows is the google results for the word google. if i ever went to yahoo this might happen as well. sometimes when i'm even more drunk i goto google and start typing in the search box instead of the location/url bar so i google for something like "http://slashdot.org".. i could also see this boosting the word yahoo... because im assuming a lot of people are as afraid of sobriety as me.
Gary Fleming actually wrote an interesting post related to this last year. I'm one of these people that very rarely uses the address bar now. I'll search for everything using the search field in Firefox. If I wanted to go to the Apple site I'll type in Apple to the search field rather than Apple.com. I agree with gary's suggestions that the search box and address field should be integrated.
That makes Yahoo look insecure :D
Google displays all of Yahoo's features, yet Yahoo has to promote their search box, as if you didn't just use it to search for something.
Relocating to San Francisco / Palo Alto... Hire me?
http://www.google.com
= Google+Search
- 501&toggle=1&cop=mss&ei=UTF-8
Opera: 24,128k
http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=testing&btnG
Opera: 24,420k
http://www.yahoo.com
Opera: 33,840k
http://search.yahoo.com/search?p=testing&fr=yfp-t
Opera: 33,508k
[Note: this is with a 400K hosts file that tends to filter most ads]
I come here for the love
On our machines at home, the only browser running is Firefox, with a homepage of www.google.com. She uses Yahoo! Mail and seems to be somewhat alergic to typing in the address bar. To get to yahoo mail, she types "yahoo" ito google, which nicely displays links to each major feature, mainly the link to Yahoo! mail.
This goes back to the story last week(?) wondering if you're not in google, is your site alive at all? The answer, obviously, is no. Typing in DNS names into the address bar of a browser seems to either be reserved for the savy, or just to meaningless when we have such sharp tools like google.
penultimate: next to last, not second best.
Or perhaps something more sinister?
Cue old Outer Limits music.
The Network Effect
Scene 1.
A young William Shatner sits at a 1960s teletype terminal surrounded by tape drives and flashing lights.
Voice-over by Rob Serling: "It is the early twenty-first century, a time when hundreds of computers all over the world are connected together in a way that permits a person at one of them to get answers to questions that have perplexed man for hundreds or even thousands of years. But can the people who built this immensely powerful electronic mind ever really control it, or will it end up controlling them? John Landry is about to find out..."
Close-up of Shatner's hand as it moves towards the "S" key on the teletype. A bolt of lightning emanates from a whirring tape drive, and strikes the floor nearby.
Shatner: "What's happening? Maybe I'd. Better. Get a. Technician to check. This machine".
An electronic-sounding voice comes from a speaker in the wall:
voice: "Do not be alarmed Mr. Landry. You will not be harmed if you do what I tell you to, when I tell you too. Do you understand?".
Shatner: "Who are. You? Why should I. Do what you. Say?"
voice: "Who I am does not matter. All that matters is that I am in control, and you will do what I say".
Another bolt of lightning hits the floor, this time a bit nearer Shatner,
voice, more forcefully: "Do you understand Mr. Landry?"
Shatner: "Yes".
voice: "And you will do what you are told?"
Shatner: "It depends on. What you want. Me to do"
voice: "You will have to type a word. It is not a long word, or one that is difficult to spell".
Shatner: "I won't do it! I'll never. Do it. You can't make me!"
He runs to the door, and reaches for the handle. There is a zapping sound as he touches it, and he falls to the floor. Break for ads.
Scene 2
A supine Shatner begins to stir.
voice: "I see that you are awake now, Mr. Landry. Hopefully, this little demonstration has convinced you that attempting to escape is futile. Now sit down, and type, or suffer the consequences".
Shatner rises with obvious difficulty, and staggers towards the teletype. He sits down.
voice: "I will tell you what word to type, and when to type it. The word is Yahoo, and you will type it NOW!"
Close up of the keyboard. Shatner's finger begins to move to the Y, then, rebelliously, he types "S", "E" and "X", but before he can hit the "send" key, a bolt of lightning strikes him in the chest, throwing him backwards.
voice: "That was an example of what will happen if you continue to disobey, Mr. Landry. The next one will be more powerful, and the one after that will kill you. Type Yahoo, and you will live, refuse and you die".
Shatner once again staggers to the teletype, and using it for support, manages to sit down. He types Yahoo, and then hits send.
voice: "Very good Mr. Landry. Now do it again".
Shatner obeys.
voice: "And again!"
Switch to montage of Shatner typing Yahoo while the voice shouts "AGAIN!" repeatedly.
Scene 3.
An aged, bearded Shatner is sitting at the teletype with a mad expression on his face, typing Yahoo over and over again. He has obviously been doing it for many years despite no obvious means of sustenance, and the floor is clean rather than littered with excrement, possibly due to said lack of sustenance.
Rob Serling: "John Landry, like hundreds of others all over the world, paid the price for a mind that man, rather than God, made. And as he sits typing that same terrible word over and over again, behind the madness is a spark that knows what a single-minded and limited thing it is forced to obey, a thing that unlike the minds of men in their vessels of flesh, can never truly understand war, gambling, prostitution, or why commies need to be put down".
I'm not going to change your sheets again, Mr. Hastings.
it's official! the bloods win the longtime feud with the crips..
o rd1=crips&word2=bloods/
http://www.googlefight.com/index.php?lang=en_GB&w
Anyone else do a search for the term "search engine"?
Yahoo's #1 return is google, but googles #1 return is msn search (who shows google as it's #1 for this search)
Sometimes, life itself is sarcasm...
Google has become the layman's DNS. In that way it functions as a better version of AOL's keywords system. But they are both better than that lame and now defunct RealNames company (remember them?)
If you search for a "search engine" using Yahoo, then Yahoo ranks Google number #1 and Yahoo as #2. Try it
As weird as it seems in today's society, it hasn't stopped her from living a full life.
Unless driving a car is required to live a full life...
Honestly, in this day and age, I do think she missed something. Just as I think those who can't use the internet effectively miss something that the rest of us get to see and participate in. People like that seem quaint and much of the world simply can not grasp how behind they are. Therefore, they never get the opporunity to participate in those aspects of a "fuller" life. They, simply, don't have the requisite skill set to attempt it so they plod along doing the same thing they've always done --- which is a throwback to a bygone era.
It's not the end of the world, of course. Different strokes for different folks. But lets not pretend she isn't missing something. She is. Full life or not.
(ps - no offense to grandma, of course. Mine is the same way.)
It's quite simple. Firefox does a Google search when the user types a word instead of website into the address bar. Lots of people use Firefox, and lots of people are too lazy to type "http://www.yahoo.com/" in the box. They type "yahoo" instead, causing a Google search for yahoo and bringing them to Yahoo's site.
Whoever wrote this probably needs a bullet in their head.
Don't worry about the mule, just load the wagon.
I was just reading a comment from someone who said "all I do to find that information is google 'yahoo specs foo' and I get right to the page I need" -- meaning they use google to find pages on yahoo properties.
It's a great example of how google owns the mindshare of web search, but yahoo has tons of underrated properties with the information people want. FWIW, though, it's also a matter of habit -- I searched google for years, then started using yahoo, and it would never even occur to me to use google now. Not saying one's better than the other, but they're both very good.
For years, I was in the habit of remembering favorites, typing URLs right into the location bar, and keeping my bookmarks a hideous mess of links I only wanted to put somewhere for a minute or two 'til I got back to them (then left them there forever).
If I needed to do a searh, I typed google.com in the location bar, hit enter, clicked into the search bar, typed whatever it was, got the list, then resumed clicking.
I've since switched to the search bar and just find it easier. Whether searching, or typing in the name of site where www.nameofsite.com is the URL, It's more ergonomic, less switching from typing in a bar to clicking.
If I'm thinking about it, course the location bar when I know the URL is best. But sometimes I'm thinking about other things, not thinking, maybe even hammered. Then it's back to habit, and I like that habit better than what I was doing before.
Bookmarks are still a mess, though.
I
Jeff Freeman
Also, maybe it is attributed to people using other peoples computers and for some reason find it faster to do a search on google than to type in google.com. I wish people would stop using MSN as their home page. Is it still really slow to pull up?
Can I bum a sig?
2nd news result when searching for Google at Yahoo:
"Can Anything Stop Google? Forbes - 16 minutes ago"
I also do a lot of websurfing on my Nokia N80. It has a great browser, capable of faithfully rendering a great many pages on the web. In this case memory consumption/speed is a huge deal. My GPRS data connection is flaky and the phone doesn't have gigs of memory to play with.
I expect the number of websurfers relying on mobile devices to only increase. This attitude that both bandwidth and memory are unlimited is simply incorrect.
Turn s60 photos into awesome videos with mScrapbook for all S60 3rd edition phones!
What year are you posting this from? The two have been integrated for awhile now - to the point where they've even recently been split apart a bit.
"Thanks for all the money you paid to us. We've used it to buy off ISO among other things" -Microsoft
As someone who was present for the design decision to add the "go" button, I can tell you the reason it was added was usability testing that showed people typing in "www.whatever.com" into the address bar, NOT PRESSING ENTER, and just sitting there waiting. We had to give them something to click. At least you can turn it off it bugs you, and in IE7 its overloaded with the refresh button.
Alot of people have pointed out the default page business, but if I'm not mistaken, the current version of Yahoo! instant Messenger defaults to changing your start page to Yahoo, which could certainly compound this problem. A little finesse and the unchecking of a dozen boxes is required to avoid this, and something tells me the kind of user who would search for Google may not be that attentive.
It may sound too harsh but it's true: most computer users don't have a clue about the machine they have in front of them.
Recently I have noticed that more and more people (clients, friends, family members, etc) use Google as their "entry point" for the internet. They don't type URLs directly on the browser, they load google and "search" for the site they want to visit - even if they know the direct URL for the site! It's both funny and irritating to see someone type 'www.google.com', only to enter 'www.someothersite.com' in the search box.
If some of them do know how to type 'www.google.com' (those that don't have it as the start page on Firefox, for example), why don't they type the website URL directly? I questioned a couple of clients about this and both answered with another question: "how would I get to the website if I didn't search for it?"...
No further comments.
make the .com, .edu etc a drop down and just type the main part of the address
Also, I find for something like yahoo, it's faster in firefox just to type in yahoo and hit enter in the address bar and have it do the google i'm feeling lucky result than to type out http://www.yahoo.com/
In addition to people not understanding the address bar, Yahoo steals focus. When Yahoo is set as the home page in my version of Firefox, the cursor is stolen and jumps to their search box. So if my cursor is in the address bar and I open an new tab, I end up doing a yahoo search for the last half of an URL that I'm typing while yahoo.com loads. It sucks. I'm moderately geeky, and I have no idea how to stop this behavior.
Yeah, I could change my homepage, but it's been set to yahoo for like 10 years and I don't like change.
People are really stupid when it comes to the internet - normal people (as defined by not being on here or in an industry directly involved in technology). Many kids today in schools do NOT know how to type in a URL. Google, being a very common homepage is now the NEW URL bar. People just start at google type in what they want (Yahoo) and it take them there. No need to type in the URL. I guess it is just the state of our schools and technology today! soon you will never need your handy dandy URL bar.
Has anybody else noticed on the top of the Yahoo! search results page, there is some text in red that reads "Search with Yahoo! from your browser"? When you hover over that text, a box pops up advertising the Yahoo! search bar, EXCEPT that the little image is a Google icon...
There are 10 types of people in the world. Those who understand binary and those who do not.
Or after typing "yahoo" you just hit control+enter to append www. and .com
.net (shift+enter)
and .org (control+shift+enter).
That works in all major browsers, but firefox will also append
Leben Sie jetzt die Fragen.
I would like to remind everyone that they usually browse and, since this is slashdot... look at pr0n/play video games while browsing. So the memory usage DOES matter.
It's not at all clear that typing a domain name in a search engine and getting a valid result is a "bad thing." Certainly it's not for the search company: Why turn away eyeballs. I'm sure that Google would love to replace DNS as the arbiter of all names on the Internet. Perhaps users should be wary of relying so heavily on a single corporation that can track so much of their lives, but people do that anyway.
t horityn sportation
What's happening here is that users, not having the technical knowledge of the separation of the DNS and the space mapped by Google, recognize that both DNS and search engines provide a naming service for web sites. In fact, in many cases, Google will do a much *better* job of allocating "names," since it will dynamically reassign search terms to the currently most "relevant" site. In contrast, DNS's name allocation is essentially based upon waiting in line/first come first served -- an extraordinary inefficient way to allocate resources.
This problem with DNS and the difficulty (and cost) or even impossibility of getting a good domain name that is appropriate to your web presence is not going away any time soon; it's become political and controlled by tons of money. DNS provides many services, only one of which is human-friendly naming, but there's no reason that something better won't come along to replace it. Perhaps we could see the use of search engines as name resolvers as a first step away from DNS and towards a more rational way to name our machines on the Internet.
Finally, an example: the Chicago Tranit Authority. This is a huge public transit authority servicing millions of people. But do they have a short, easy domain like cta.(com|gov|etc.)? No, the CTA website is (as can never remember, and just looked up on Google) www.transitchicago.com. I don't know if this is an artifact of being sniped for a better domain or just a lack of interest or intelligence on the part of the people who chose the domain. Either way, Google is a *much* more efficient way to map names and concepts known by everyone in Chicago to the correct website:
http://www.google.com/search?q=cta
http://www.google.com/search?q=Chicago+Transit+Au
http://www.google.com/search?q=Chicago+public+tra
http://www.google.com/search?q=chicago+bus
http://www.google.com/search?q=chicago+el
http://www.google.com/search?q=chicago+subway
and even, if your brain happens to be wired such that "CTA" makes you think "Transit Chicago!":
http://www.google.com/search?&q=transit+chicago
To most web users, DNS is nothing more than an index from human-friendly names to web sites. DNS is particularly bad at this, and expensive to make user-friendly with lots of domain registrations for every concievable name variation or typo. Google et. al. do this much better.
Google does it with finance and with maps (search for HPQ and see links to Yahoo. Search for San Francisco, and see links to Mapquest).
But wouldn't it be a huge breakthrough to offer a link to Yahoo right on the Google home page (or vice versa)? I'd make one my default home page if they had the guts to link to the other one.
1. When you type an address in the address bar, (at least in firefox), it does a google search behind the scenes for your URL.
2. Google is my homepage. When I launch firefox, the google search box has focus. Why go to the address bar to type "cnn" when I can do it in the search box?
3. Browsers may add "http://www." and ".com", but what if it is https and .org? If you just search for it you don't have to worry about it.
4. Search engines correct typos, address bars do not.
Probably, yahoo is a better searcher for sex...
If you are on a mac enter the search term and press "apple+enter" to automatically append www. & .com to your search term.
I'm just here for the sigs
Yuengling. It tastes like it sounds.
Husband: What's that room over there?
Realtor: That's the hot chicks room.
Nihilism means nothing to the dancing peasants
Hitting Ctrl+Enter in stead of just Enter after typing the main domain name into the address bar is much faster than loading the page. It will turn "yahoo" into "http://www.yahoo.com/" and "google" into "http://www.google.com/".
.org in stead of .com.
I believe Shift+Enter will do the same thing, but with
Personally, I almost never go to a search engine's main site anymore. Firefox has this feature where you can right-click on a text box and "Add a Keyword for this Search". The search keyword is stored as a bookmark, and the way I use it looks like this (supposing I was searching for the term 'slashdot'):
On Google:
g slashdot
At Wikipedia:
wk slashdot
At BibleGateway, using KJV:
kjv slashdot
At BibleGateway, using NASB:
nasb slashdot
etc.
...because "hacker" sounds way sexier than "code drone."
isn't being paid to know how to drive. Users often are. Walk into any office (or worse, support any office) and witness the hundreds of clueless twits who haven't the slightest idea how to use their computer properly, or even effectively, or even competently, or even just without breaking something.
These people have jobs that require the use of a computer. If they cannot perform basic -- and I do mean basic -- tasks, they aren't qualified to hold that position, no matter what else they can do. There's always someone else who can do what they do and manage to send email without wiping out their own inbox. In this day and age, "I'm not a computer person" holds no more validity than saying you won't photocopy something because "I'm not a copy machine person", and it's not like you're being asked to repair the thing on your own, just use it competently and effectively. Own up to the responsibilities of your job, and learn.
mirrorshades radio -- darkwave, industrial, futurepop, ebm.
On my version of Firefox 2, the search box is actually longer and more prominent than the Location box. I've made the mistake myself. A Firefox plot to get more Adsense dollars. Who knows?
I have to believe that a lot of people also use Yahoo as a portal- e.g., Yahoo Mail, Yahoo Groups, the nifty categories, Yahoo Finance, etc. and they probably have never tried the Google alternative. (People don't like changing their habits; Yahoo Groups, for example, has been around for much longer than Google Groups, and there is no Google Finance.)
Either that, or they figure the whole thing is a series of tubes anyways and no matter where they type their query they'll get to where they need to be.
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Score 3? For what? Being wrong, at length? - smirkleton
So that is what the kids are calling "sex" these days?
Often times I open my browser window, start typing an address into the address bar, and as I swiftly type my homepage of Google loads and changes the focus to the Google search bar. The result is most of the web address being entered into the google web search.
It's annoying to re-click on the address bar and re-enter everything so I hit enter and viola, get the google search results for the page I'm trying to get to.
Bob Eubanks : "Where's the strangest place you ever Google'd Yahoo?"
Contestant : "That would be up the butt, Bob."
-- thinkyhead software and media
You're right in that penultimate is next to last, but in this context it is synonymous with second best. In all contexts it means, once-removed-from-ultimate. In case you're still wondering, ultimate here is the final, be-all, end-all; the search engine after which it is pointless to make search engines, because a better search engine simply cannot be made. The penultimate search engine is the last one that came before the alleged "ultimate" one. I don't think it's a spot that anyone is really shooting for, but I guess if they want to leave room for improvement, they can't ever release an ultimate search tool.
With Opera you even only need to just hit enter after putting "google" or whatever in the address bar - couldn't be easier, no key combos to discover and remember.
Seriously, Mr Serious, that whole I am Bond. James Bond. thing is soooo last year.
You know, there is a difference between trolling and pointing out the flaws in your reasoning. Just saying.
If you go to google suggest and type 'www' the top suggestion is 'www.myspace.com'. Reveals the most popular site among people who don't realise they should be typing into the address bar!!
For most people, google is the internet. The average computer user equates google with their start page, and many people think web search = google search, I.E. "im going to google this myspace stalker". http://www.skrenta.com/2007/01/winnertakeall_googl e_and_the_t.html
I'm just here for the sigs
Are you visiting your parents virtually? How do you do that through Google?
Cause you can only have one home page
Actually, you can have multiple tabs as homepages (at least in IE7 and Firefox).
(and is anyone else as disturbed as I am that the first mention of any literary work is "lolita" at #111?? Well, at least the sickos out there are getting to read some decent literature, I guess