Comment by stevenicr | Hacker News Reader

Comment by stevenicr | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

There are some portals listed on this similar recent hn thread, in which I added to a similar comment, ( https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19040384 ) - basically that for many people the internet is google, and for many, especially in other countries from what I have read, 'the internet' is facebook.

It appears many people do not know how to use urls or ask people about other portals.

If facebook censors it, they may never know it every existed on the internet. For others if Google doesn't show it on the first page of results - it does not exist.

I should of seen this coming years ago I noticed when I would tell people to go to whatever-site-url.com - they would open a browser and put that into the search box.

Heck people put google.com into the box and search for it rather then enter a url and hit ctrl-enter.

Now many phones and tablets are also defaulting search boxes, browsers, and voice searches to be using these censoring services - not showing ways to escape these bubbles, solidifying the walls of the garden.

> Heck people put google.com into the box and search for it rather then enter a url and hit ctrl-enter.

Not even that. They google directly from the address bar. Once you could google without going to google.com, anecdotally I started to notice most people would google everything, including URLs they obviously knew

Once jerks started domain name spamming this became recommended behavior unless I’m 100% certain of my url.

remembering urls is not a trivial task. it's the reason why we have bookmarks and history functions in browsers. a good search engine like google abstracts that away. i couldn't remember the name stack overflow for quite some time(i always associated stack with hay in my mind)

just typing in "hay code questions" would get me to stackoverflow in google. not so in bing/yahoo search(at the time)

Indeed there are likely many good reasons for making the url bar become a search bar under certain circumstances (I would bet the money google pays mozilla for these kinds defaults was actually touted as 'make things better for the users' )

and it certainly can make things better in some ways, and likely for a majority of people.

I for one however was appalled the first time I found not typing my url properly sent that data to google to find a suitable alternative.

(also disturbed when I see cell phone carrier give me a "you may be looking this-and-that list of links when a 404 or similar is detected - helpful maybe, doing it for the monetization? probably. Stealing privacy at the same time? Maybe.

Providing a curated version of available resources? Yes. That is often censoring more and more these days. Google does not provide the internet options to end users that it did 7 years ago.

I have seen people go to the url bar type "google" and hit enter - which on many browsers default searches google for google.

Whatever the reasoning for these issues, the result seems to be that most people think they need to use google to get to parts of the internet and don't know any other way.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com