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Comment by wodenokoto | Hacker News Reader

Isn't it also the most searched-for term on Google?

People just type "google" in the address bar when they want to go to a search engine.

There is a relevant comic for this https://img.memecdn.com/scroll-wheel_o_903702.jpg and as someone who has worked level 1 helpdesk, it's very true. People find a way to use the system that ends up working for them even if it's convoluted.

I keep my mouth shut cause I know it's absurd to think everyone should learn to use a computer efficiently as possible, but watching most people use a computer is torture for me

Every time they grab the mouse for something that has an easy shortcut I feel the seconds of my life being drained away

I feel the same way whenever I touch my mouse in a code editor like Sublime or VS Code.

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.

>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.

Non-technical people do weird things.

Early into my career I had a corporate job and virtually all of my coworkers would follow the same approach:

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

Older users have probably been burned by mistyping the URL and ending up on a spam site that owns a proximal address like "googl.co". I myself remember having it happen back in the day.

These days big companies with scammable audiences like FB and Google buy up any domain name that could reasonably be associated with them.

I've stopped manually typing urls put of fear of typosquatting. If you don't have something bookmarked, it's safer to google for the website and click the first non-ad result.

Same. I used to mock those used Google as their address bar. But I've ended up in the same place. At least for sites I don't visit daily / weekly. There's so many different TLDs now. I never remember if some rarely visited site is .com or something else.

"Oh my God, Jerry? When you check your email, you go to AltaVista and type 'please go to yahoo.com'?"-Tom Haverford.

I don't like using the address bar for search. It just feels wrong to me, like the browser is taking over that much more of what it thinks I want to do.

Yes, very common. Not something us techies do too much, but remember, we're approaching the point where the majority of the world's population uses some sort of computer, while there are people alive in computer-available regions that did not have one for the majority of their lives, or use them only "transactionally".

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)

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