'Google' is most searched word on Bing
bbc.com
bbc.com
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)
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 ?"
As far as I can tell - it already does this. Now I hate how it works and it looks bad, but it does show web search results for what I type in the start menu.
And I will actually push back a bit on the start menu because I hate that the start menu searches the web. I want it to search my computer, I have a browser for web searches.
It'd be even better if it said "You need to consent to these 100 cookies for us to show you what 8*9 is".
Omnibox sucked until it reached a point where it didn't.
But microsoft is so focused on competing to google's product that they fail to realize they don't even need to go there.
With that said, we're talking about a company who can't even search properly for the installed app given the infinite resource of a modern computer and an app list below a hundred, so I don't want them to make the search menu/search any more of a disaster.
Start->Begin Typing->Wait 10 seconds as the menu hangs because it can't resolve some ad
Personally, if I want to use the web, I'll open a browser. That's not the role I have for my OS, I don't want. And if it does have that capability, providing an alternate search engine should be doable, and it should respect my default browser.
Microsoft system doesn't care if you're typing calc.exe or John Smith or 8x9 it will do the crappy web search, crappy app search, crappy store search, crappy calendar search, and vomit a mix of useless results in your face.
That's what makes it "hard" to do it right, and frankly something that microsoft just doesn't have in their dna (if they did, their start menu search wouldn't be so horrible). I think an OS that did it right would be improved, and I hope to hell and back that microsoft won't try it because they will never succeed at that.
Maybe there are external forces preventing them. Be it patents or even just the threat of being accused of anti-competitive practices again?
For me they just don't get search, like, the very idea of search or not just searching, it's understanding what you're searching for. And when you bring that down to the start menu, it become super clear and obvious that they're out of their league.
You might think "so what, it does work" but 99% of the issues in the start search are due to this offloading to bing that is not aware of your local computer and data.
I was pretty sure it already did this...Just tried it again because you made me second guess myself and yup, sure enough, it already does this.
Wow.. at least show me I goofed up, you useless piece of software!
Used to be, Firefox would show previously visited sites/pages (arranged by how often you visit them) first.
Now it loads Google search results first and I very often step into them like it's some dogshit on the ground.
but how is that going to increase the server hit rate directly tied to $employee (pardon, %EMPLOYEE%)'s annual wage increase ?
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.
I remember when google beat places like yahoo and excite because it had a simple clean interface.
But no, they can't leave well enough alone and just let me use my machine the way I want to. I don't want news on my work homepage, heck, even the weather widget bugs me because I can't turn it off.
So I found the Edge executable, added "off" to the end of the file name and now it's just sitting there, broken. I'm sure some update will come along and "fix" it for me but for now this slightly passive aggressive but mostly useless reaction on my part made me feel slightly better.
I'm not the same MS hater I was in the 1990's but sometimes they make it hard to forget that time, wish they would learn to get out of their own way and mine.
Linux of the early 2000s maybe. I've never had a driver problem with Linux, and it has been my primary OS on my desktop and various laptops for the past ~7 years, and I've installed it on computers for other people many times.
Is driver support worse than on Windows? Of course; hardware manufacturers usually only bother to make drivers for Windows.
But is it a problem most people will run in to? Definitely not.
Alternatively if I type 'hacker', I shall be shown the three windows I currently have open, along with the 7 bookmarks, that match that string.
Otherwise it's a handy shortcut to launch any application I know is installed on the local host.
I believe it's consistently been providing this service for more than twenty years.
Compare ctrl-escape on Microsoft Windows, which should offer much the same experience.
Often while using Microsoft Windows I am trying to find a way back to a fleeting pop-up that graced a corner of my screen before I could fully read or act upon it. This invariably fails to provide a sensible result. For example, type 'update' if you wish to search for, but certainly not find, the source of the various noisy 'Windows Update' notifications. Prepare thyself for disappointment.*
The level of polish, robustness, ease-of-use and efficiency of today's KDE versions is incredible. It is lightweight, too. This is the desktop environment that stays out of the way, but here when you need it. There are no strong decisions that surprises anyone, things are familiar, there is no hostility towards users requesting obvious features. The user interface does not change so much from versions to versions, but is rather improved (a lot, in tiny ways).
Only, it is secretly so. Nobody seem to know. I don't know what can be done about this.
KRunner is doubly affected by this. It is not quite discoverable, does not get in the way of users not using it, yet is so convenient. I'm lost whenever I'm using another environment just because KRunner is not here.
(it can also be brought up by alt+space, which matches the keys of Launchpad on Macs)
KDE 4 was pretty messy - from instability to questionable features or lack of features - 4.0 "released" too early, nepomuk (and later baloo) being a resource hog, the PIM suite pulling in two database servers, amarok only supporting fuzzy filters, virtual desktop support stagnating in favor of "activities", kwin compositing had lots of glitches. Even krunner used to crash or hang frequently. I still have ~/.p script to quickly kill and restart plasma (via krunner, hah) from those days because it would fuck up so often.
Really glad that they spend the time since then motly polishing and KDE 5 has been much better about not shoving unwanted crap down users throats.
For Windows, this can be accomplished with PowerToys Run. It's effectively replaced my Start menu for 99% of things.
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 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.
https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=today%205-y&q=...
I would have been dismissive of this a few years ago, but I would have been wrong. I have seen many people including developers, _WEB_ developers, do this. Some of them can't be bothered to change their default search engine even though the option is available, it's almost muscle memory to type 'www.google.com' into the search box, and then click a result, and then search for what they wanted on google.com.
Well they are grateful to me when I change their default search engine for convenience. But when pointing out that they can just type their search terms into the address bar, I am given the indulgent, polite "thank you but not interested in this microefficiency" smile.
This one. Blows my mind every time.
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 meetings better.
Humans suck :)
It's when we reject the wise advice because... because we're stubborn?... that is when it sucks.
The thing about this url search is that they type the full url, sometimes even with the "http" bit (rarely https, but I digress), into the search field. then they get the results page a second or two later, and then _maybe_ they click the correct result if they didn't get mislead by some crappy SEO magic.
That's a lot of extra work just to get to hopefully arrive at the same page they would have arrived at had they typed that url into the address field.
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.
Apologies if it was just a typo, but in case English is a second/nth language just FYI that your 'niece' is your brother or sister's daughter; I think you mean 'nephew' (brother or sister's son).
(And, er, if a niece 'identifies' as 'he/him', then I would assume (but who am I to tell them etc.) they would also identify as a son and a nephew thenceforward.)
I go to google.com rather than searching trough the address bar because the google.com homepage has a link to tell it "no, I did not actually want German google" whenever it forgets those cookies while the search result pages do not have that link.
Of course for a while now it will still push localized results with no way to disable that.
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 basic uses of browsers. The trouble with catering to the "bad users" is that every forced simplification removes an opportunity for learning to be better. Every removed and hidden feature "for their own good" amplifies the feedback loop of dumbing down the user of the software, enabling a stasis of competence hovering around some arbitrarily chosen threshold of functionality.
In the case of big tech, keeping users dumb and incompetent is a tool to reinforce the walled gardens. Keeping the consumer ignorant of nuance and flexibility creates artificial problems that are solved with more dumb software, gatekeeping every possible increment of utility by making everything a commercial transaction.
I had a user who was proudly showing me a 99 cent app that allowed them to ping things from their phone. When I showed them the command line and that they'd already had the ability to do that from their laptop, they were embarrassed and a little annoyed.
Their ignorance was encouraged and cultivated throughout the time they spent trying to find a solution to a problem, guiding them to an app store and to waste money on an app.
Artificial incompetence is the defining feature of those who reside in walled gardens. It seems to be the rock bottom to which big tech companies race, because it's the most efficient way to perpetuate a revenue stream. Not only treating people as incompetents, but developing the ux and ui around that core assumption.
There's definitely a place for simplicity and user friendly design, but artificial incompetence is a scourge, one of the worst anti-patterns affecting consumers. There needs to be a culture shift away from rent seeking software design and toward making users as competent and knowledgeable as possible.
You can still disable that in firefox, but it is so badly tested that it somehow breaks the search field on its default home screen.
Good one. I’ll be using it. Thanks for that.
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".
I've started to really oppose that, and avoid it in my own speech. ('search' is fine.)
It may sound like a stupid trivial thing, but language is so.. powerful/important, and I don't need Google ingrained in mine. It was difficult/didn't come naturally at first, but now I use 'search' without thinking about it, and if anything it sounds weird to me when others say 'google'.
I also think if I were Google ('s lawyer, or in some appropriate/ly-senior position or whatever) I wouldn't feel great about it - it's surely quite damning in any competition law cases on search?
</Fun little side fact>
I'm sure they also have concerns about it being coming over as monopolistic behavior
People just type "google" in the address bar when they want to go to a search engine.
Is this still common? Modern browsers will give an option to run a search directly from the URL bar, or automatically search anything not a URL... I haven't actually had to "go to a search engine" to search in a long time.
1. type 'google' into the address bar
2. type the name of a major website into the search bar, e.g. 'cnn'
3. click on the cnn link at the top of the search results
I always asked them why they wouldn't simply type cnn.com in the address bar, but the only response I got was a confused look
People simply don't understand URLs. Google has made it so easy to find their destination that they'd rather waste 3 clicks than learn how to browse the web efficiently
These days big companies with scammable audiences like FB and Google buy up any domain name that could reasonably be associated with them.
Just eyeballing these two facts should not surprise you that a large fraction (if not the majority) of people use computers in archaic or inefficient ways.
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The HN audience more or less devotes a big chunk of their brain-space (however you define it) and time to operating or being aware of computers, so naturally we have an interest in making that use efficient. But a lot of people only use computers socially (where the speed of human interactions is much slower than any inefficient web-searching) or for specific operations (buying stuff online, banking, check the weather, entertainment, etc) where any kind of computer use is still faster than, for example going to an ATM to check your balance.
(By computer I mean any general-purpose informatics, including phones)
Every time they grab the mouse for something that has an easy shortcut I feel the seconds of my life being drained away
I think about how there's some emacs/vim pro out there never using their mouse and modifying multiple lines of code within seconds while I click and drag and select from menus.
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.
For what it’s worth, ive been a DDG user for many years, including their mobile browser.
Not once have I ever seen a targeted ad. The only ads are search ads; if I search for shoes, I’ll get ads for shoes.
"We have submitted evidence showing that the most common search query on Bing is, by far, 'Google'"
I assume they have collected this evidence from Chrome users?
Bing for me became a meme, a search engine that nobody wants to use but that is nevertheless pushed down your throat by Microsoft (just like IE a few years ago). I tried to use Bing a few times, one thing that I find absolutely annoying are the pictures - every day a new image - I find it very distracting. I am not going to search engine website to watch pictures. I have the same feelings about Doodles, the last one (Olimpic games) really got on my nerves. Maybe there should be a two versions of Google - one for casual browsing and one for actually doing work.
As EU citizen I am really ashamed of EU inability to do big tech. Europe should have its own search engine. US, Russia and China seem superior in that regard. Search engine is no longer a simple indexing app, now it can be used to shape worldviews and do propaganda. Still I do not believe EU can do anything in this regard...
"Navigational queries" was what we called them. There's actually a semi-rational reason why you'd want to do them: if you misspell a bank's URL, for instance, Google will fix it for you, while there could be sleazebags camping on the domains with the common misspellings.
Searching something like "get new cats to adjust to one another" on Google returns nothing but list-icle, SEO-laden crap with incredibly low information density and no mention of personal experience with the search subject from the ethereal "author" of such posts.
Adding site:reddit.com does wonders, but even just typing "get new cats to adjust to one another *reddit* " will return threads going back almost a decade with loads of suggestions, personal experience, and more.
It's not always useful (not anywhere near everything on reddit is worth being sourced) but just chucking the word reddit into search seems to be the most straightforward way to dredge up actual user-generated content that's not 100% crap.
Wish there were search engines designed to crawl more of that side of the internet and less of Google's schlocky results. I'm so sick of list-icles.
Someone somewhere (probably duckduckgo) thinks 'search on reddit' is useful enough that there's a shortcut for it.
...assuming Bing isn't preventing that behaviour.
What if they don't click on the google.com search result?
Referer: https://www.bing.com/search?q=google&pq&cvid=3C49B41400954D3...
Google can use that to see your search terms because it in the value of the q attribute.
If they don't go to a Google property then they will still be able to get this information, if the website they do go to uses Google Analytics (which is most of the web).
I bet “facebook” is a very popular search term too for the same reason.
It’s petty and childish, but it’s my way of coping with the fact that I have no power when I’m using Windows. And I don’t even use Google or Chrome.
- Google Meet
- Google Home
- Google Pixel
- Google Dooodles
And so on...
I'm not the biggest fan of Chrome domination for the future of the web, BUT I found microsoft insistances on trying to force edge/bing down my throat really pushing me away from trying them. If they do that when they're behind, how am I supposed to think they will be any better if they ever get back on top.
Luckily Startpage doesn't care about Getty.
Also LOL - https://discussions.apple.com/thread/4260837
The worst is Google, even if I try to verbatim search something, the results are about what Google thinks I should be interested in, not about what I am actually looking for.
I see here a huge market for search engines which deliver relevant results.
(1) When I search for two words like OpenIDConnect replyUrlsWithType, only give me results that have both those terms. Don't make me put pluses on everything. And when I do give you pluses, please honor those pluses.
(2) When you ask me "Did you mean [blah]?" give me a button to push: yes, no.
You could literally do this by next week. I'll check in next Friday to give it a try.
https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-edge/what-s-im...