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'Google' is most searched word on Bing

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Re: 'Google' is most searched word on Bing

#31

Post by reuben364 »

robbedpeter wrote: post #18
blunte wrote: post #2

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 browse…

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 b…

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.

Re: 'Google' is most searched word on Bing

#34

Post by cblconfederate »

Dear Microsoft,

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)

Re: 'Google' is most searched word on Bing

#35

Post by PeterisP »

egeozcan wrote: post #17
politelemon wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 deve…

> "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 mee…

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.

Re: 'Google' is most searched word on Bing

#36

Post by trabant00 »

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.

Re: 'Google' is most searched word on Bing

#37

Post by rawoke083600 »

cblconfederate wrote: post #34

Dear Microsoft, 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 th…

Ja, the best advice I ever heard was, "do something right and the money will (probably) follow".

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 ?"

Re: 'Google' is most searched word on Bing

#38

Post by whoopdedo »

blunte wrote: post #26
robbedpeter wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 b…

> the address bar is the search box 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.

Re: 'Google' is most searched word on Bing

#39

Post by notimetorelax »

mattowen_uk wrote: post #29
ed_elliott_asc wrote: post #23

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".

And technical people might prefer faster loading lightweight pages to Bing’s. Target audience for bing is weird.

Re: 'Google' is most searched word on Bing

#40

Post by dagw »

mattowen_uk wrote: post #29
ed_elliott_asc wrote: post #23

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".

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.
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