Hacker News Reader

Comment by azinman2 | Hacker News Reader

Googling facebook is how many people access it and other things. That will probably correlate more to a older and less savvy audience, but should still give a decent proxy in terms of popularity of the web property.

What it _doesn't_ take into account is mobile app usage, which might have been what sucked in all those people vs just total loss.

View on HN

    > Googling facebook is how
    > many people access it

I suspect mobile usage of Facebook makes the percentage of people Googling for it a rounding error.

Facebook is accessed mostly mobile these days. I remember that they said sth around 70% mobile usage, and that was 1-2 years ago. Many people never use the desktop app (me included).

Facebook pushed mobile first several years ago and were very successful with it.

removed the app+messenger from phone couple of months ago, never going back. but I guess I am an outlier

I still have the apps and account but never use them anymore.

I can report at least a 20% improvement in stress levels.

Facebook is way too overwhelming for me to use. Fortunately the parts that I need to use occasionally (birthdays and messages to acquaintances) can be achieved by spinoff apps (Events and Messenger)

I did the same and saw an 11% improvement in battery life by removing those two apps. I had relatively similar amounts of usage initially, but eventually reduced usage to more scheduled times 1-2x per day due to lack of notifications.

no, i did the same removing both apps when messenger took over my texts making my phone slow.

That was an optional change :P I have both Messenger and Signal installed, and Signal in place of my normal texting app. It's doable.

The web app seems plain ugly now. the mobile UI is so much better

I will be probably faster in every task you can imagine in the web app than in the mobile app. I don't see how mobile UI is better.

Are we talking about the Facebook desktop website vs. the Android/iOS app? If so:

The Facebook iOS app is snappy on my iPhone 7. Compared to that the Facebook website I access with my MacBook Pro Late 2013 does not feel smooth, and the navigation is terribly broken. Pressing the browser back button often simply does nothing even though the URL in the browser location bar changes. It is frustrating. The iOS app just works.

Even on a desktop / laptop, many people probably use the browser's auto-complete or bookmarks for access.

Talk to people who run usability studies and ask how many users know that the browser can do these things.

People joke about "my grandfather opens his browser and types 'Yahoo' into Bing, clicks the link and types 'Google' in to Yahoo, clicks the link and types 'Facebook' into Google to get to Facebook", but it's not that wild an exaggeration of how much of the developed world -- which is not computer-literate -- uses the web. That's part of why walled gardens and native-feeling app experiences are so successful.

I put a link to Facebook in grandma's bookmarks toolbar, she generally just clicks that to get started.

Adoption of Chrome likey erases that pattern. As more and more people adapt to searching from the address bar, autocomplete is also used more and more.

No people type google.com into the address bar and then enter facebook in search page.

You'd be surprised how often people do in fact do exactly that. I know two personally. I don't have overall figures but it's definitely greater than zero.

Isn't there a service which shows popularity of search terms? That would be one way to get a handle on frequency.

Found it:

https://www.google.com/trends/explore?q=Facebook

I don't know this tool well enough to know if this is for queries where the only term is Facebook. Happy to be corrected!

What browser ? I just click on the internet.

Isn't the growth at the other end?

I just have it permanently open now.

Not sure most people even use bookmarks to be honest. Maybe my non-technical friends are atypical, though.

"Navigational searches" are a thing and they are very optimized by Google. But yes, auto-complete likey handles a lot as well.

Even better, people google "google" to access google.

https://www.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&q=google,face...

Note that the searches for FB on Google have been dropping while the searches for google haven't really.

I wouldn't be particularly surprised to see Facebook do a face-plant soon given the trends, as I believe google-trends is not an unreasonable proxy for how often people want to get to a site. But, perhaps that's just my optimism for humanity peaking through...

Yeah, I think essentially Google used to be the only (or at least most popular) means to discoverability of something on the web. App stores have replaced that for many classes of searching.

I don't think this is even vaguely true.

App stores have terrible search features, and return thousands of scams before the real thing for anything except a small class of very well-known apps.

If it is true, I wonder what class of user it's true for, and why they got this way?

Because many users have no idea on how to find out what things are available and what's popular, and/or even that there might be aggregators of this info, or the concept of such.

Observe how many people do not even do a search for very simple things. The concept that they might be able to know or discover certain things doesn't seem to actually occur. Of course, this needs to be distinguished from their just being lazy, but even this is problematic, since it's almost always the case that finding it themselves is much faster than asking someone else (who will often essentially just do what the asker didn't...). It's almost a kind of learned helplessness, but with the "learned" part often being very short or implicit.

Of course, Google's secret is that it owns a monopoly app store on the dominant mobile platform too. ;)

But app usage isn't reflected in search trends...

Or anyone in china

Both Google and Facebook are blocked in China, so there's nothing to measure.

Edit: interested to know why the downvote.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com