Google itself isn't helping to distinguish URLs vs. Search when they make the address bar in Chrome do both.
FWIW, If I type "facebook", it sends me straight to facebook.com, "twitter" takes me to search results.
Confused Facebook user debacle not what it seems.
11–20 of 61 posts
Re: Confused Facebook user debacle not what it seems.
#12holy smokes that's hard to read. i waited a few seconds for the styling to finish... but it never did.
Can you BELIEVE that there are people out there that are so stupid to use white on grey for their blog posts?
Re: Confused Facebook user debacle not what it seems.
#13holy smokes that's hard to read. i waited a few seconds for the styling to finish... but it never did.
Ctrl-A and it's actually pretty nice.
Re: Confused Facebook user debacle not what it seems.
#14The address bar in the browser is totally broken from a usability standpoint.
If you change it, it doesn't reflect the page you are looking at. This means for example that you can get into a screwed up situation where:
- you are looking at page a
- page b is being loaded
- page c is displayed in the address bar
There is just no conceivable mental model that non-nerds can build that can predict the behavior of the address bar. When that's the case, people fall back on scripts, in this case "go to google.com; type in what you are looking for; hit return;"
In fact, I've sometimes wondered if you could make a competitor to the web that would be much easier to use.
Re: Confused Facebook user debacle not what it seems.
#15It is amazing to this that people need to go to google in order to pull up any site. No, don't type in google.com, type in facebook.com instead. Do you do a google search when logging in to online banking? Checking your email? And seriously? How much time can one sepnd on facebook in the first place? I swear my uncles and aunts and parents play on it for hours .
I always get confused by this attitude, I use the internet pretty much all day, most days.
When I visit a url, I type it in the "address bar", however I have never typed a tld, so my address bar is actually a google search, its generally always the first link, I click on it, on subsequent visits it auto completes.
Compared to the amount of times I have misspelt a domain, plain forgot it, or got the tld wrong, typing a keyword and clicking on the first result was always the easiest way for me.
Re: Confused Facebook user debacle not what it seems.
#16It is amazing to this that people need to go to google in order to pull up any site. No, don't type in google.com, type in facebook.com instead. Do you do a google search when logging in to online banking? Checking your email? And seriously? How much time can one sepnd on facebook in the first place? I swear my uncles and aunts and parents play on it for hours .
I recently watched a friend in his mid 20's try to install some poker software on a new laptop. He's been playing poker online for years.
Anyway, to get the software he clicked IE which brought up the default home page (AOL). In the AOL search box he typed 'google' and selected the first result. Then when google loaded he typed 'poker stars' in the search box to get to the correct site.
Re: Confused Facebook user debacle not what it seems.
#17I think the author of this blog has a view of "society" that is a little myopic.
The premise that the "structure of today's society" is based on facebook and the web is, I think, something several hundred million people in this country would disagree with.
The internet itself is not yet one of the few pieces of technology that is intractably ingrained in our societal DNA. On that list? I don't know. Cars. Telephones. Television. And _facebook_ certainly isn't.
Re: Confused Facebook user debacle not what it seems.
#18Maybe Hacker News should try and organize free 2 hour "Introduction to the Internet" classes for the elderly?
I'm sure it's mainly a matter of ignorance and not a matter of intelligence.
Re: Confused Facebook user debacle not what it seems.
#19Maybe Hacker News should try and organize free 2 hour "Introduction to the Internet" classes for the elderly? I'm sure it's mainly a matter of ignorance and not a matter of intelligence.
I volunteered for one of these before (it was a series of one-on-one sessions). I patiently walked an elderly gent through the absolute bone basics: starting a browser, using the address bar, using Yahoo mail. It was quite slow at times, but he was a pleasant old guy, and at the end of it, I think he really was ready to correspond with his grandkids on his own. It was definitely rewarding, and I'd recommend it to anyone.
Re: Confused Facebook user debacle not what it seems.
#20The problem here is Google's inline news feature.
It looks like they've actually special cased searching for 'facebook login' as the news results for that search are no longer the top hit. I think this is the wrong fix.
The real problem here is how news articles on a topic are automatically the top result on Google, which you can be sure the SEO/phishing crowd is frantically trying to take advantage of.
Unfortunately, for Google, they're trying to expand and be more than a search engine company under that name. So the powers-that-be want to keep news results where they are without changing the formatting, when really that's the better solution. Stick all the news results into a light-blue div with rounded corners so that it's more visually distinct from 'normal' search results. Saying "News results for" doesn't change the fact that it's Google, and it's the top hit, so in many users's minds "it's gotta be (close enough to) right".