Alternatively, "Every URL bar looks like a search bar to users."
URL bars came first though.
Doesn't matter. A ton of people don't understand what URLs are or what an address bar is. Everything is treated like a search bar.
Every search bar looks like a URL bar to users
281–290 of 417 posts
Re: Every search bar looks like a URL bar to users
#282Earlier quoted context omitted.
> three-dimensionally I had actually never put it into words before now, but that makes a lot of sense, and it actually accurately describes how I see my screen. To me, the OS taskbar is "higher" (as in, closer to me) than the application window title bar, which in turn is higher than whatever controls are in the application itself (think Firefox back and forward buttons, URL bar, setting menu etc), which is itself h…
Huh. I have that experience, but in reverse. More "specific" or application/context-specific UI elements feel "closer" to me, while browser chrome is farther in the background, and OS all the way in the back. I believe that's the visual paradigm most graphical OS's going back to the '90s used.
Yup, the desktop metaphor. Basically the computer screen is like a desk, and each application is a paper/document on the desk that can lay on top of one another. Mouse cursor is more or less your finger/hand to interact with the “documents”.
Re: Every search bar looks like a URL bar to users
#283Earlier quoted context omitted.
They were probably trying to post spam and thought your search bar was a comment input field.
Could be, but usually bots that post spam include some form of link, not just keywords. The link is the entire point of posting spam. There also seems to be a few distinct bots doing this, with distinct user agents (but bots with the same UA spam-search on the same topic out of epharma, casino, warez). I also have another, identical search box in another part of the site and it has never seen any sort of spam bots.
I wonder if these are attempts to drive up the “interest” metric, with the hypothesis that the more search for a specific string, the result that is exact match gets higher ranking?
Re: Every search bar looks like a URL bar to users
#284Earlier quoted context omitted.
People get old and obstinate. It's sad but at the end of the day, they choose to be like this.
I promise you it is younger people too. I train bank workers from freshly minted tellers to longtime officers, none of them can navigate to a URL unless it is a clickable hyperlink. The URL is one of the most foundational elements of internet usage, it is the way to get directly to where you want to go. Having a map is nice, but don't you need to know how to walk in order to get where you are going? Heck, there have…
I see this all the time, with people not understanding where files are or that there is some kind of hierarchical filesystem lurking behind the covers. Thanks for the link.
Re: Every search bar looks like a URL bar to users
#285This is a good example of making the mistake of conflating implementation details and user interface design. Firefox always had two boxes: URL bar and search. One of the big changes Chrome made when it was born was to have the Omnibar, being of course one bar that does both. If you think about this as an engineer, Firefox's design decision makes sense. You don't want to accidentally leak things to a search engine. UR…
Firefox actually had both, you could always search with the "main" bar. That's why having two has been so infuriating over the years, if I ever had to use Firefox, I've removed the search bar immediately.
However, one thing that Firefox failed to fix over dozens of versions have been one-word-searches, which Chrome handled correctly while Firefox tried to resolve that one word as a domain and didn't even fall back to search if that failed. That single thing has brought me back to Chrome within minutes every time I've wanted to try Firefox again.
Re: Every search bar looks like a URL bar to users
#286Earlier quoted context omitted.
If you're talking about telling someone over the phone how to enter example.com/specificpage.ext?key1=val1&key2=val2&key3=ABCDEFG0123456789, I'd agree that is painful and hopefully not necessary. Telling someone to enter example.com into the URL bar, click on the specificpage link, then select the correct information for the printer you have is much easier
That is what I was talking about; pretty good example, except the missing protocol and "://". I'm remembering the difficulty of explaining what is a forward slash and what is a backward slash. After all, they both lean forward - one leads with its feet, the other with its head. It doesn't help if your contact is using a different keyboard from you. You have to keep asking them to read it back to you. I still have to…
Just hope you never need to get someone over the phone to visit slashdot
Re: Every search bar looks like a URL bar to users
#287This is because Google and Microsoft have confused the users by allowing them to type whatever into wherever and they just figure it out. Some would call that good UI - probably myself included - but it teaches bad behavior and makes people dumber by obscuring what things really are.
Not only allow, but forcefully redirect their search input up into the address bar. In my opinion this has been a deliberate and concerted effort by google to get everyone to 'search' instead of go directly to sites and this ux behaviour has been bothering me for a very long time now. I am not at all surprised people are searching for https after all this time. That being said, there is likely a large number of urls…
Note that, sometime this year or 2020, Google stopped redirecting the search bar on the new tab page to the top url bar in Chrome. The omnibox search still does both web addressing and searching, but the new tab page has considerably less-confusing UX now.
Re: Every search bar looks like a URL bar to users
#288The author's thesis may be true: maybe people make this mistake all the time. But, remember on the Tonight Show , where Jay Leno would go out on the street and ask a lot of people questions, then they'd edit together a segment that made it look like all of the interview subjects were idiots? It's not fair to characterize the entire sample from a curated selection. In this case, Amazon probably gets hundreds of millio…
amzn.to is the shortdomain for affiliate links, so perhaps the autocomplete was a poisoned entry by whoever made that url :)
Re: Every search bar looks like a URL bar to users
#289The YouTube app on iOS (and I assume Android) extends this. If you have a url to a YouTube video that you want to open in the app, you past it in the search bar and it returns the associated video.
Re: Every search bar looks like a URL bar to users
#290Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's the perfect setup really, you can turn it off, but if you want it you can type "? " into the address bar and it'll go to default search - or use one of your engine short codes as the first word "@google hackernews" about:config -> keyword.enabled -> false (to stop sending possible search terms automatically to your default search engine, this includes when you type a URL firefox mistakes for a search term) about…
This is something... but it isn't perfect. The address bar is still not purely an address bar. It still defaults to sending a query to a search engine (I like to use this to search for partial URL matches, for example, navigating git repos that I use frequently). That's what the search bar is for. Bah humbug. Even with all these options set, FF still encourages confusion between URLs and searching.
I'm not sure I understand.. there's an internal search (tabs, history, bookmarks) which sounds like what you're doing - there's no search engine used for this. Or do you mean the Search suggestions (Settings -> Search -> uncheck "Provide search suggestions" to disable, some of these suggestions are FF generated)