Hacker News Reader

Comment by mdwrigh2 | Hacker News Reader

> With this "message" on their homepage (which as jaysonelliot pointed out is not even seen by many people)

How is 64% of their traffic (89 million visitors in 2009)[1] not "many people"?

[1]: http://blog.compete.com/2009/04/21/home-page-visitors-top-pu...

Wow I am surprised by that. I stand corrected, my apologies. That is what I get for taking anecdotal experience and extrapolating ;) I can't remember the last time I went to Google.com, but evidently heaps of people go there.

But I stand by my opinion that this is a weak response from Google.

Not only do lots of people still visit google.com, but the types of people who still visit it are precisely the types of people who need to learn about this law. I suspect those of us savvy enough to use a toolbar are disproportionately more likely to already know about and oppose the bill, while the kinds of people that go to google.com to search for 'facebook.com' are disproportionately more likely to know nothing about it yet.

The kinds of people that go to Google.com are also the kinds of people who don't fully understand the repercussions of a law like SOPA. Google not working would drive home the message to them. They could learn about SOPA from an informational page like the one Wikipedia is going to put up during the blackout.

No, the kinds of people that go to google.com are the kinds of people who would assume "the internet broke" if google.com looked dramatically different when they loaded it. They may even need someone to point out to them that Google is actively taking a stance on it, despite having seen the page.

It would be massively bad if google were to shutdown -- most people like my mom simply types "yahoo" in her chrome browser, which does a google search for yahoo, then she clicks the first result to go there -- same goes for most people using android phones, typing out ".com" is just extra work people don't do. If search were down for a day, people would just assume their internet is broken, even if they knew about the alternatives.

Another good reason for them not to do it (from their POV) would be this:

If they shutdown for a day everybody suddenly thinks "Wow, Google can actually go down.. what if this happened again? what if it was for longer next time? Is it really a good idea to give these guys a monopoly on search and put all our eggs in one basket?"

You'd be surprised how many people type "google" in to the google search bar on their computer, then click the first search result so that they can go to google.com and then enter their search terms.

It seems ridiculous to us, but I've seen many non-techy people do it.

Thank you for finding this.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com