People go to the name they know. Since for many (most?) people, the word “google” is a verb meaning to search the web, they naturally will prefer that service even if they don’t know why it might be better than whatever is the default.
Meanwhile, it reminds me that we developers don’t understand users or don’t provide understandable interfaces for them.
Observe many people and you’ll see a maddening pattern of browser use: they will use any available method to get to google, and then they will put a url into the google search text box. Perhaps the address bar is inconveniently too high on the screen, or maybe they just don’t know what a url is.
Not to mention some search “google” in the
Google search box which is there on their browser homepage but not labeled as google. They don’t trust text fields unless it’s in google website’s environment.
> Observe many people and you’ll see a maddening pattern of browser use: they will use any available method to get to google, and then they will put a url into the google search text box. Perhaps the address bar is inconveniently too high on the screen, or maybe they just don’t know what a url is.
I would have been dismissive of this a few years ago, but I would have been wrong. I have seen many people including developers, _WEB_ developers, do this. Some of them can't be bothered to change their default search engine even though the option is available, it's almost muscle memory to type 'www.google.com' into the search box, and then click a result, and then search for what they wanted on google.com.
Well they are grateful to me when I change their default search engine for convenience. But when pointing out that they can just type their search terms into the address bar, I am given the indulgent, polite "thank you but not interested in this microefficiency" smile.
> "thank you but not interested in this micro efficiency" smile
I've seen a friend press caps lock, type a letter and press caps again to type capital letters. That's the smile I got when I introduced them the shift key.
Also the smile my niece had when the car mechanic was explaining to him how he could spare some gas money by up-shifting early.
Also the smile I had when my wife was giving me tips on how to plan meetings better.
When we follow the good suggestion, we don't suck at all. That's how humans should work.
It's when we reject the wise advice because... because we're stubborn?... that is when it sucks.
The thing about this url search is that they type the full url, sometimes even with the "http" bit (rarely https, but I digress), into the search field. then they get the results page a second or two later, and then _maybe_ they click the correct result if they didn't get mislead by some crappy SEO magic.
That's a lot of extra work just to get to hopefully arrive at the same page they would have arrived at had they typed that url into the address field.
It's the response of "I don't care about this thing, and I don't care about improving it, so please stop making me waste my attention on the thing I don't care about."
In many people nowadays the scarce resource is not time or even money, but attention; and not every aspect in your life is worth your attention to try and improve it, that's premature optimization, wasting effort on improving something that ultimately is insignificant.
> Also the smile my niece had when the car mechanic was explaining to him how he could
Apologies if it was just a typo, but in case English is a second/nth language just FYI that your 'niece' is your brother or sister's daughter; I think you mean 'nephew' (brother or sister's son).
(And, er, if a niece 'identifies' as 'he/him', then I would assume (but who am I to tell them etc.) they would also identify as a son and a nephew thenceforward.)
Shift on a keyboard is different from shift on phones. On a keyboard you hold two keys down at the same time; on a phone you don't. This is why people use Caps Lock for typing capital letters, so they can press one key at a time.
> I would have been dismissive of this a few years ago, but I would have been wrong. I have seen many people including developers, _WEB_ developers, do this. Some of them can't be bothered to change their default search engine even though the option is available, it's almost muscle memory to type 'www.google.com' into the search box, and then click a result, and then search for what they wanted on google.com.
I go to google.com rather than searching trough the address bar because the google.com homepage has a link to tell it "no, I did not actually want German google" whenever it forgets those cookies while the search result pages do not have that link.
Of course for a while now it will still push localized results with no way to disable that.
They don't know what a url is, and to them the address bar is the search box, and the search box is the address bar. Developers of all the major browsers made the two elements work interchangeably.
A power user can create a web navigation system with plug-ins and customizations that rival a space shuttle for complexity and sophistication. The novice user, and users that are tech challenged can get stuck on the most basic uses of browsers. The trouble with catering to the "bad users" is that every forced simplification removes an opportunity for learning to be better. Every removed and hidden feature "for their own good" amplifies the feedback loop of dumbing down the user of the software, enabling a stasis of competence hovering around some arbitrarily chosen threshold of functionality.
In the case of big tech, keeping users dumb and incompetent is a tool to reinforce the walled gardens. Keeping the consumer ignorant of nuance and flexibility creates artificial problems that are solved with more dumb software, gatekeeping every possible increment of utility by making everything a commercial transaction.
I had a user who was proudly showing me a 99 cent app that allowed them to ping things from their phone. When I showed them the command line and that they'd already had the ability to do that from their laptop, they were embarrassed and a little annoyed.
Their ignorance was encouraged and cultivated throughout the time they spent trying to find a solution to a problem, guiding them to an app store and to waste money on an app.
Artificial incompetence is the defining feature of those who reside in walled gardens. It seems to be the rock bottom to which big tech companies race, because it's the most efficient way to perpetuate a revenue stream. Not only treating people as incompetents, but developing the ux and ui around that core assumption.
There's definitely a place for simplicity and user friendly design, but artificial incompetence is a scourge, one of the worst anti-patterns affecting consumers. There needs to be a culture shift away from rent seeking software design and toward making users as competent and knowledgeable as possible.
I'm talking about people using the address bar just enough to get to google. Once they're looking at the text field where you're invited to enter your search terms, there they type in "www.whatever.com".
And then, after years of being conditioned to treat the first result as an ad, they skip over the link that's clearly labeled "whatever.com", instead clicking the second or third one down for "Get whatever here" and are phished by it.
Adding more fuel to the fire is that most of the benefit in learning the underlying principles of software is being able to build, modify and introspect it. In a terminal, to view a text file, you could use cat. On a phone, you download an app. However, you can't pipe your Free TXT Viewer 2000 to another app (and if you could, it would probably inject ads). As the walled garden closes in, the incentives to learn diminish as being able to accomplish anything with such acquired knowledge will be severely limited.
Your phone has a different operational workflow than your command line. Yes you're not going to "pipe" it, but on my phone I can open an image in my Photos app, click 'share to' and share (open) it either into my Messages app, a file manager app, or an editor, which opens it just fine. Apps can absolutely share data between them. But not in the sense that an output buffer of the program is being injected into another. That really doesn't apply to GUI apps even on your desktop.
If I'm not using bookmark, I'm using the same approach. Because of simple reason: If I would make a typo, Google will correct it and I will not land in a some faecbook.com.
> Since for many (most?) people, the word “google” is a verb meaning to search the web
I've started to really oppose that, and avoid it in my own speech. ('search' is fine.)
It may sound like a stupid trivial thing, but language is so.. powerful/important, and I don't need Google ingrained in mine. It was difficult/didn't come naturally at first, but now I use 'search' without thinking about it, and if anything it sounds weird to me when others say 'google'.
I also think if I were Google ('s lawyer, or in some appropriate/ly-senior position or whatever) I wouldn't feel great about it - it's surely quite damning in any competition law cases on search?
Good point, I didn't think about trademarking. Bing changing its button label from 'search' (or 'go' or whatever it currently is) to 'google' would be fun to watch play out!
Excuse me?! It is disingenuous to infer that a complete demographic doesn't know about how the Internet works.
For some late-age Boomers, I would agree that a large percentage of them would do this, but Gen-Xers are in their 40s and 50s, and most of them have literally grown up surrounded by technology.
No doubt Google is far more popular than Bing, and "to google" is synonymous with search itself. But one important difference to note may be that while "Bing" is almost used only for the search engine, the word "Google" is associated with a very large number of different products:
Some how not the answer I expected, but I can see the argument. I keep nothing in my browser, besides a few bookmarks, so it didn't occur to me that someone would care about those things being automatically transferred over.
Part of the problem Microsoft have is that they just set the default to bing, people open it and don’t know what it is so search google.
These same people don’t know how to change their default search so keep searching for google.
If they wanted these people to stay they should get rid of their background image and just give a search box like google does - basically trick people into staying.
Something I've noticed with my work machine. The homepage in Edge is some mangled mash up of Bing News tiles and my works' SharePoint activity, and is just branded 'Microsoft'. Non technical people stuck with this homepage are very likely to just type 'Google' into it to "get them out onto the Internet".
The target audience for Bing's homepage is a bunch of product owners in MS who want their crap on the homepage to try to increase their interaction metrics.
I used google maps the other day on my phone for the first in in ages (to see if they had anything for the fuel issues in the UK at the moment). I was amazed how full of junk I wasn't interested in getting in the way of the actual map.
I remember when google beat places like yahoo and excite because it had a simple clean interface.
Yea, the Edge homepage is atrocious and looks like a spam site. I don't blame people for wanting to get away from it and to something that looks more trustworthy ASAP.
I finally got so fed up with Edge quietly changing my preferences back to their defaults I decided to completely stop using it. I have an MS account, Office 365 for work, etc. I thought, this is great, I'll continue using Firefox for personal and Edge for work, it integrates with my company account, that's neat.
But no, they can't leave well enough alone and just let me use my machine the way I want to. I don't want news on my work homepage, heck, even the weather widget bugs me because I can't turn it off.
So I found the Edge executable, added "off" to the end of the file name and now it's just sitting there, broken. I'm sure some update will come along and "fix" it for me but for now this slightly passive aggressive but mostly useless reaction on my part made me feel slightly better.
I'm not the same MS hater I was in the 1990's but sometimes they make it hard to forget that time, wish they would learn to get out of their own way and mine.
> Linux has all these driver problems... most things won't work with plug'n'play... I understand why people stick to Windows.
Linux of the early 2000s maybe. I've never had a driver problem with Linux, and it has been my primary OS on my desktop and various laptops for the past ~7 years, and I've installed it on computers for other people many times.
Is driver support worse than on Windows? Of course; hardware manufacturers usually only bother to make drivers for Windows.
But is it a problem most people will run in to? Definitely not.
It's not like Microsoft hasn't been trying to make Bing look like Google Search for years (see this 7 year old article: https://betanews.com/2014/10/14/is-microsoft-trying-to-confu...) - but they have apparently concentrated on copying the format and styling of the results pages, the actual search page which the user first sees is still markedly different. But the "Bing wallpapers" are their USP ("Experience beauty every day - make Bing your homepage"), so they're not willing to give them up...
To be fair, Bing search is pretty much at a level comparable to google in the early '10s in my experience, so I understand why people are not thrilled by it. It's _fine_, but it's definitely not up to par with Google, not even close.
You fools, you own a gate to the internet. When i search 8*9 in the start menu, show me the result of the multiplication instead of a link to "search web for 8*9". Make the menu auto-complete with the titles of the first 5 web results instead of random ads. Make it work well as an actually useful extension of search. Forget about edge and bing.com, you will care about the brand name later. (You can thank me later with a sizeable compensation package)
>show me the result of the multiplication instead of a link to "search web for 8*9"
As far as I can tell - it already does this. Now I hate how it works and it looks bad, but it does show web search results for what I type in the start menu.
And I will actually push back a bit on the start menu because I hate that the start menu searches the web. I want it to search my computer, I have a browser for web searches.
That calculator looks like that's part of the Bing results page... so it made an HTTPS connection and parsed some HTML, JS and CSS to show what 8*9 is.
It'd be even better if it said "You need to consent to these 100 cookies for us to show you what 8*9 is".
No thanks, I'd rather have a simple and obvious checkbox to disable all this sleazy web crap in the Windows UI. If I want to search the web, I use a web browser. If I want to search my machine, I would like to use the Windows search feature (if it would actually work).
I think parent point was that if it was well done we would like it in the start menu, but if it was only 99% ok or below we would hate it.
Omnibox sucked until it reached a point where it didn't.
But microsoft is so focused on competing to google's product that they fail to realize they don't even need to go there.
With that said, we're talking about a company who can't even search properly for the installed app given the infinite resource of a modern computer and an app list below a hundred, so I don't want them to make the search menu/search any more of a disaster.
Quotes, "this-string must-exist", is a pattern that all search tools really need to obey. Though I do give them slack if they also match runs of equivalent word-character-only strings E.G. "this string must exist" in the same search.
That’s…already how it is? I seriously cannot believe how bad the start menu still is in 2021 given how limited the scope of core functionality is. Somehow, simply surfacing the main entry points into dozens of GUI applications is a Herculean task that a modern OS simply cannot accomplish.
As far as I can tell, it already does this, and it's my most hated "feature". The delay while it does the search, combined with everything shuffling around at the end of that delay is terrible for me.
Personally, if I want to use the web, I'll open a browser. That's not the role I have for my OS, I don't want. And if it does have that capability, providing an alternate search engine should be doable, and it should respect my default browser.
It doesn't do this, because it's not smart and treat everything the same way. You first need to figure out what kind of content the user is talking about, and then go around that.
Microsoft system doesn't care if you're typing calc.exe or John Smith or 8x9 it will do the crappy web search, crappy app search, crappy store search, crappy calendar search, and vomit a mix of useless results in your face.
That's what makes it "hard" to do it right, and frankly something that microsoft just doesn't have in their dna (if they did, their start menu search wouldn't be so horrible). I think an OS that did it right would be improved, and I hope to hell and back that microsoft won't try it because they will never succeed at that.
There has simply never been a product or feature in the search world (online or offline) where Microsoft got it, everything they have that works is when they dropped their idea and just copied whatever the other guys were doing.
For me they just don't get search, like, the very idea of search or not just searching, it's understanding what you're searching for. And when you bring that down to the start menu, it become super clear and obvious that they're out of their league.
It does do this, if I put 8*9 in the start menu a little embedded calculator comes up that says 72. It does also prompt me to "see web results" for 8*9 though.
It doesn't, at least not in the way it should. It's not windows figuring it out and giving you a specific result, it's just a webview into Bing, and bing that show the results that way. That's why just under the calculator you have a link to a streetwear clothes brand.
You might think "so what, it does work" but 99% of the issues in the start search are due to this offloading to bing that is not aware of your local computer and data.
I remember loading the Mac Spotlight and trying to calculate some decimal numbers, let's say 63.10 * 3.50 . But because the Mac was expecting the German locale with "," as a decimal separator, it just silently gave me 2208500 instead of 220.85 (or 220,85).
Wow.. at least show me I goofed up, you useless piece of software!
I mean, if it wasn't a bug that it was expecting German, then it didn't do anything wrong. The most I could see feasible would be, if you press the wrong decimal separator, the system asks if you want to change or correct the locale setting for math
Part of Google's success nowadays, I think, is that typing stuff in a browser's address bar takes you straight to Google's search results page. They turned Google into the replacement for typing in web addresses.
For me, FF shows matches from History first (they have a little clock icon), followed by search results (which aren't from GOOG if you have switched your default search engine to something else, mine are all 'search with DuckDuckGo'), followed by 'Firefox Suggest' which looks to be bookmarks that somehow match whatever I typed in the location bar, at least for me.
When you type into the Safari address bar, it drops down a list of search results while you're typing. I am guessing this comes from the long-promised Apple search engine. It works well enough that I often find myself skipping the Google search results page altogether.
This is default behavior on my Pixel phone made by Google. When I swipe up and try to search for apps on my phone, it most often starts showing me search completion results from web.
windows is like an early 2000s web site with a title like 'Top Ten Life Hacks ...' with ad ridden pages where you must search through them to barely make out a sniff of the content you were ostensibly promised, and then a 'next page' button that will lead you into another ad ridden nightmare. windows is a corporate created abomination where the combined deluded career ambitions of hundred or so corporate careerists collectively pool and fester
KRunner in KDE 5 (default shortcut: Alt+F2, but also replicated at the bottom of the start menu) does that. The modules for different purposes (like running applications/shell commands, searching browser tabs/history/bookmarks, searching files/emails/contacts, openstreetmap, etc.) are pluggable and can be easily disabled if the functionality is not desired by the user.
I find weird to say, but I actually like Bing. It has a LOT less bullshit compared to google. It searches for what I asked it, not about what it thinks I actually want, image search and in general the interface has less dark patterns.
My main SE is duckduckgo, but using Bing out of curiosity I was surprised to say "not bad". Compared to google without adblocker which is just awful.
I see no difference in results, only in interface, Duck being even cleaner than Bing, reason why I use it (the privacy part sounds nice but is not actually verifiable)
Good point! I guess that would give them the number of people searching for google on bing. Maybe there is enough public information about the totals to say this was the most searched term.
In addition they have Google Analytics on a huge % of pages, so they can track referrals from Bing to those pages, and if the referrals to Google's homepage eclipse those, that's a strong indication.
Google can use that to see your search terms because it in the value of the q attribute.
If they don't go to a Google property then they will still be able to get this information, if the website they do go to uses Google Analytics (which is most of the web).
Google analytics, most sites have it installed, plus Chrome is also sending telemetry, so they know when any site is opened, what was the referrer search engine.
I'm sure most of it isn't people searching for google though, it is people using the default search box in Edge or where-ever else Bing is the default search provider as if it is a smart address box, hammering in “google” without the .com (or other tld) and getting what they want as the first answer.
I bet “facebook” is a very popular search term too for the same reason.
I do this all the time, I am used to the browser autocompleting the URL from history, but I think Edge was designed to maximize Bing searches to pump up usage numbers.
Whenever I end up on Bing, I go out of my way to search for “Google” (and click the link) before closing it. If I also happen to be in Edge (because microsoft ignored/changed the defaults again), then I also make sure to search for “Chrome”.
It’s petty and childish, but it’s my way of coping with the fact that I have no power when I’m using Windows. And I don’t even use Google or Chrome.
The Google Image Search nerf is so tragic. It used to be incredible, and now it can barely find anything. And there's nothing that comes close to how it was before. I'll usually go through the course of Google, Bing, Tineye, and Yandex to reverse photos but I'll regularly get no hits on things I know should exist somewhere online
People underestimate the value of familiarity. I use Google rather than Bing not because I know it's better or such like but I'm used to it and can't be bothered to learn the quirks of some other system. So if I had to search on a computer with Bing as default I'd probably type Google and use that. Bit like I use English rather than French not because it's a better language but because I don't want to spend ages learning a new one. In the discussion the other day on why people use Chrome rather than Firefox was Firefox changes the user interface and disabled the extensions they use. On the other hand as far as I can tell Chrome works basically the same it always did.
>People just type "google" in the address bar when they want to go to a search engine.
Is this still common? Modern browsers will give an option to run a search directly from the URL bar, or automatically search anything not a URL... I haven't actually had to "go to a search engine" to search in a long time.
Early into my career I had a corporate job and virtually all of my coworkers would follow the same approach:
1. type 'google' into the address bar
2. type the name of a major website into the search bar, e.g. 'cnn'
3. click on the cnn link at the top of the search results
I always asked them why they wouldn't simply type cnn.com in the address bar, but the only response I got was a confused look
People simply don't understand URLs. Google has made it so easy to find their destination that they'd rather waste 3 clicks than learn how to browse the web efficiently
Older users have probably been burned by mistyping the URL and ending up on a spam site that owns a proximal address like "googl.co". I myself remember having it happen back in the day.
These days big companies with scammable audiences like FB and Google buy up any domain name that could reasonably be associated with them.
I've stopped manually typing urls put of fear of typosquatting. If you don't have something bookmarked, it's safer to google for the website and click the first non-ad result.
Same. I used to mock those used Google as their address bar. But I've ended up in the same place. At least for sites I don't visit daily / weekly. There's so many different TLDs now. I never remember if some rarely visited site is .com or something else.
I don't like using the address bar for search. It just feels wrong to me, like the browser is taking over that much more of what it thinks I want to do.
Yes, very common. Not something us techies do too much, but remember, we're approaching the point where the majority of the world's population uses some sort of computer, while there are people alive in computer-available regions that did not have one for the majority of their lives, or use them only "transactionally".
Just eyeballing these two facts should not surprise you that a large fraction (if not the majority) of people use computers in archaic or inefficient ways.
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The HN audience more or less devotes a big chunk of their brain-space (however you define it) and time to operating or being aware of computers, so naturally we have an interest in making that use efficient. But a lot of people only use computers socially (where the speed of human interactions is much slower than any inefficient web-searching) or for specific operations (buying stuff online, banking, check the weather, entertainment, etc) where any kind of computer use is still faster than, for example going to an ATM to check your balance.
(By computer I mean any general-purpose informatics, including phones)
There is a relevant comic for this https://img.memecdn.com/scroll-wheel_o_903702.jpg and as someone who has worked level 1 helpdesk, it's very true. People find a way to use the system that ends up working for them even if it's convoluted.
I keep my mouth shut cause I know it's absurd to think everyone should learn to use a computer efficiently as possible, but watching most people use a computer is torture for me
Every time they grab the mouse for something that has an easy shortcut I feel the seconds of my life being drained away
I feel the same way whenever I touch my mouse in a code editor like Sublime or VS Code.
I think about how there's some emacs/vim pro out there never using their mouse and modifying multiple lines of code within seconds while I click and drag and select from menus.
And I'm willing to bet "chrome" or "google chrome" is also near the top, or at least a significant number, typed by users in edge/bing right after install.
I'm not the biggest fan of Chrome domination for the future of the web, BUT I found microsoft insistances on trying to force edge/bing down my throat really pushing me away from trying them. If they do that when they're behind, how am I supposed to think they will be any better if they ever get back on top.
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[ 2.2 ms ] story [ 226 ms ] threadMeanwhile, it reminds me that we developers don’t understand users or don’t provide understandable interfaces for them.
Observe many people and you’ll see a maddening pattern of browser use: they will use any available method to get to google, and then they will put a url into the google search text box. Perhaps the address bar is inconveniently too high on the screen, or maybe they just don’t know what a url is.
https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=today%205-y&q=...
I would have been dismissive of this a few years ago, but I would have been wrong. I have seen many people including developers, _WEB_ developers, do this. Some of them can't be bothered to change their default search engine even though the option is available, it's almost muscle memory to type 'www.google.com' into the search box, and then click a result, and then search for what they wanted on google.com.
Well they are grateful to me when I change their default search engine for convenience. But when pointing out that they can just type their search terms into the address bar, I am given the indulgent, polite "thank you but not interested in this microefficiency" smile.
This one. Blows my mind every time.
I've seen a friend press caps lock, type a letter and press caps again to type capital letters. That's the smile I got when I introduced them the shift key.
Also the smile my niece had when the car mechanic was explaining to him how he could spare some gas money by up-shifting early.
Also the smile I had when my wife was giving me tips on how to plan meetings better.
Humans suck :)
It's when we reject the wise advice because... because we're stubborn?... that is when it sucks.
The thing about this url search is that they type the full url, sometimes even with the "http" bit (rarely https, but I digress), into the search field. then they get the results page a second or two later, and then _maybe_ they click the correct result if they didn't get mislead by some crappy SEO magic.
That's a lot of extra work just to get to hopefully arrive at the same page they would have arrived at had they typed that url into the address field.
In many people nowadays the scarce resource is not time or even money, but attention; and not every aspect in your life is worth your attention to try and improve it, that's premature optimization, wasting effort on improving something that ultimately is insignificant.
Apologies if it was just a typo, but in case English is a second/nth language just FYI that your 'niece' is your brother or sister's daughter; I think you mean 'nephew' (brother or sister's son).
(And, er, if a niece 'identifies' as 'he/him', then I would assume (but who am I to tell them etc.) they would also identify as a son and a nephew thenceforward.)
I go to google.com rather than searching trough the address bar because the google.com homepage has a link to tell it "no, I did not actually want German google" whenever it forgets those cookies while the search result pages do not have that link.
Of course for a while now it will still push localized results with no way to disable that.
A power user can create a web navigation system with plug-ins and customizations that rival a space shuttle for complexity and sophistication. The novice user, and users that are tech challenged can get stuck on the most basic uses of browsers. The trouble with catering to the "bad users" is that every forced simplification removes an opportunity for learning to be better. Every removed and hidden feature "for their own good" amplifies the feedback loop of dumbing down the user of the software, enabling a stasis of competence hovering around some arbitrarily chosen threshold of functionality.
In the case of big tech, keeping users dumb and incompetent is a tool to reinforce the walled gardens. Keeping the consumer ignorant of nuance and flexibility creates artificial problems that are solved with more dumb software, gatekeeping every possible increment of utility by making everything a commercial transaction.
I had a user who was proudly showing me a 99 cent app that allowed them to ping things from their phone. When I showed them the command line and that they'd already had the ability to do that from their laptop, they were embarrassed and a little annoyed.
Their ignorance was encouraged and cultivated throughout the time they spent trying to find a solution to a problem, guiding them to an app store and to waste money on an app.
Artificial incompetence is the defining feature of those who reside in walled gardens. It seems to be the rock bottom to which big tech companies race, because it's the most efficient way to perpetuate a revenue stream. Not only treating people as incompetents, but developing the ux and ui around that core assumption.
There's definitely a place for simplicity and user friendly design, but artificial incompetence is a scourge, one of the worst anti-patterns affecting consumers. There needs to be a culture shift away from rent seeking software design and toward making users as competent and knowledgeable as possible.
You can still disable that in firefox, but it is so badly tested that it somehow breaks the search field on its default home screen.
Good one. I’ll be using it. Thanks for that.
I'm talking about people using the address bar just enough to get to google. Once they're looking at the text field where you're invited to enter your search terms, there they type in "www.whatever.com".
I've started to really oppose that, and avoid it in my own speech. ('search' is fine.)
It may sound like a stupid trivial thing, but language is so.. powerful/important, and I don't need Google ingrained in mine. It was difficult/didn't come naturally at first, but now I use 'search' without thinking about it, and if anything it sounds weird to me when others say 'google'.
I also think if I were Google ('s lawyer, or in some appropriate/ly-senior position or whatever) I wouldn't feel great about it - it's surely quite damning in any competition law cases on search?
</Fun little side fact>
I'm sure they also have concerns about it being coming over as monopolistic behavior
https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=today+5-y&q=go...
"We have submitted evidence showing that the most common search query on Bing is, by far, 'Google'"
I assume they have collected this evidence from Chrome users?
For some late-age Boomers, I would agree that a large percentage of them would do this, but Gen-Xers are in their 40s and 50s, and most of them have literally grown up surrounded by technology.
Edit: Did my grandparent comment get voted down because people don't know what 'disingenuous' means?
You got downvoted for calling GP out.
I flagged him because it's offensive and a sweeping generalization.
- Google Meet
- Google Home
- Google Pixel
- Google Dooodles
And so on...
https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-edge/what-s-im...
These same people don’t know how to change their default search so keep searching for google.
If they wanted these people to stay they should get rid of their background image and just give a search box like google does - basically trick people into staying.
I remember when google beat places like yahoo and excite because it had a simple clean interface.
But no, they can't leave well enough alone and just let me use my machine the way I want to. I don't want news on my work homepage, heck, even the weather widget bugs me because I can't turn it off.
So I found the Edge executable, added "off" to the end of the file name and now it's just sitting there, broken. I'm sure some update will come along and "fix" it for me but for now this slightly passive aggressive but mostly useless reaction on my part made me feel slightly better.
I'm not the same MS hater I was in the 1990's but sometimes they make it hard to forget that time, wish they would learn to get out of their own way and mine.
Linux of the early 2000s maybe. I've never had a driver problem with Linux, and it has been my primary OS on my desktop and various laptops for the past ~7 years, and I've installed it on computers for other people many times.
Is driver support worse than on Windows? Of course; hardware manufacturers usually only bother to make drivers for Windows.
But is it a problem most people will run in to? Definitely not.
You fools, you own a gate to the internet. When i search 8*9 in the start menu, show me the result of the multiplication instead of a link to "search web for 8*9". Make the menu auto-complete with the titles of the first 5 web results instead of random ads. Make it work well as an actually useful extension of search. Forget about edge and bing.com, you will care about the brand name later. (You can thank me later with a sizeable compensation package)
Sure it's a massive generalization and doesn't always "work" but dammit it's a very good starting point. Much better than:
"How do we get the most money for a user ?"
As far as I can tell - it already does this. Now I hate how it works and it looks bad, but it does show web search results for what I type in the start menu.
And I will actually push back a bit on the start menu because I hate that the start menu searches the web. I want it to search my computer, I have a browser for web searches.
It'd be even better if it said "You need to consent to these 100 cookies for us to show you what 8*9 is".
Omnibox sucked until it reached a point where it didn't.
But microsoft is so focused on competing to google's product that they fail to realize they don't even need to go there.
With that said, we're talking about a company who can't even search properly for the installed app given the infinite resource of a modern computer and an app list below a hundred, so I don't want them to make the search menu/search any more of a disaster.
Start->Begin Typing->Wait 10 seconds as the menu hangs because it can't resolve some ad
Personally, if I want to use the web, I'll open a browser. That's not the role I have for my OS, I don't want. And if it does have that capability, providing an alternate search engine should be doable, and it should respect my default browser.
Microsoft system doesn't care if you're typing calc.exe or John Smith or 8x9 it will do the crappy web search, crappy app search, crappy store search, crappy calendar search, and vomit a mix of useless results in your face.
That's what makes it "hard" to do it right, and frankly something that microsoft just doesn't have in their dna (if they did, their start menu search wouldn't be so horrible). I think an OS that did it right would be improved, and I hope to hell and back that microsoft won't try it because they will never succeed at that.
Maybe there are external forces preventing them. Be it patents or even just the threat of being accused of anti-competitive practices again?
For me they just don't get search, like, the very idea of search or not just searching, it's understanding what you're searching for. And when you bring that down to the start menu, it become super clear and obvious that they're out of their league.
You might think "so what, it does work" but 99% of the issues in the start search are due to this offloading to bing that is not aware of your local computer and data.
I was pretty sure it already did this...Just tried it again because you made me second guess myself and yup, sure enough, it already does this.
Wow.. at least show me I goofed up, you useless piece of software!
Used to be, Firefox would show previously visited sites/pages (arranged by how often you visit them) first.
Now it loads Google search results first and I very often step into them like it's some dogshit on the ground.
but how is that going to increase the server hit rate directly tied to $employee (pardon, %EMPLOYEE%)'s annual wage increase ?
My main SE is duckduckgo, but using Bing out of curiosity I was surprised to say "not bad". Compared to google without adblocker which is just awful.
For what it’s worth, ive been a DDG user for many years, including their mobile browser.
Not once have I ever seen a targeted ad. The only ads are search ads; if I search for shoes, I’ll get ads for shoes.
...assuming Bing isn't preventing that behaviour.
What if they don't click on the google.com search result?
Referer: https://www.bing.com/search?q=google&pq&cvid=3C49B41400954D3...
Google can use that to see your search terms because it in the value of the q attribute.
If they don't go to a Google property then they will still be able to get this information, if the website they do go to uses Google Analytics (which is most of the web).
Through some stats magic, it can be inferred
I bet “facebook” is a very popular search term too for the same reason.
It’s petty and childish, but it’s my way of coping with the fact that I have no power when I’m using Windows. And I don’t even use Google or Chrome.
Luckily Startpage doesn't care about Getty.
People just type "google" in the address bar when they want to go to a search engine.
Is this still common? Modern browsers will give an option to run a search directly from the URL bar, or automatically search anything not a URL... I haven't actually had to "go to a search engine" to search in a long time.
1. type 'google' into the address bar
2. type the name of a major website into the search bar, e.g. 'cnn'
3. click on the cnn link at the top of the search results
I always asked them why they wouldn't simply type cnn.com in the address bar, but the only response I got was a confused look
People simply don't understand URLs. Google has made it so easy to find their destination that they'd rather waste 3 clicks than learn how to browse the web efficiently
These days big companies with scammable audiences like FB and Google buy up any domain name that could reasonably be associated with them.
Just eyeballing these two facts should not surprise you that a large fraction (if not the majority) of people use computers in archaic or inefficient ways.
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The HN audience more or less devotes a big chunk of their brain-space (however you define it) and time to operating or being aware of computers, so naturally we have an interest in making that use efficient. But a lot of people only use computers socially (where the speed of human interactions is much slower than any inefficient web-searching) or for specific operations (buying stuff online, banking, check the weather, entertainment, etc) where any kind of computer use is still faster than, for example going to an ATM to check your balance.
(By computer I mean any general-purpose informatics, including phones)
Every time they grab the mouse for something that has an easy shortcut I feel the seconds of my life being drained away
I think about how there's some emacs/vim pro out there never using their mouse and modifying multiple lines of code within seconds while I click and drag and select from menus.
I'm not the biggest fan of Chrome domination for the future of the web, BUT I found microsoft insistances on trying to force edge/bing down my throat really pushing me away from trying them. If they do that when they're behind, how am I supposed to think they will be any better if they ever get back on top.