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Comment by jonknee | Hacker News Reader

An interesting side effect of this is the phenomenon of less sophisticated users who use Google as their address bar. If you run a decently well-known website you see this in your analytics reports (at least back when you could see Google search keywords)--repeat visitors coming to your site from Google after searching for your site by name. This is why "facebook" is the top Google search.

Since you can't find RapGenius by searching for it there is a decent sized audience of people who are under the assumption that RapGenius does not exist anymore. It's bizarre to the HN crowd, but very real. Check out their twitter feed:

https://twitter.com/RapGenius

View on HN

I consider myself sophisticated and I still use Google for something like Rap Genius:

"rap genius kendrick lamar swimming pools" would get me there quicker than any other way.

It's incredible that now that search string sends me to other pages that link to RG's lyrics but not directly to theirs.

If you actually knew how to use Google this wouldn't be a problem. The `site:` filter is your friend.

How is that faster? You're adding five characters + the .com , and will get exactly the same result.

Or just set up a custom search engine in Chrome, eg:

chrome://settings/searchEngines

search engine: rapgenius.com

keyword: rg

url: http://rapgenius.com/search?q=%s

Then just type rg<tab> in the omnibox and search for whatever you want, and get taken to rg's serp.

For most sites, Chrome should do this by default and the default keyword is just the site's URL. So simply:

    rapgenius.com<tab>search terms

autocomplete is supported so you can also just do

    ra<tab>search terms

if rapgenius.com is your first autocomplete result for "ra"

This feels like a bit of a regression. I used to be able to just use the automatic search, but it seems to be breaking for more and more sites recently. Even sites it used to pick up automatically, like tpb, now need to be manually specified.

And there's still no damned excuse for them not being able to search maps.google.com from the omnibox.

aren't we overthinking this a little much?

You are coming off as incredibly pretentious. I was unaware that by typing in the search field and expecting relevant results I wasn't using Google correctly.

It's not a "problem." I'm just incredibly lazy when it comes to looking up rap lyrics and it works for me.

That's why I /really/ like Chromes "tab to search" feature. When I visit a site with a search field Chrome remembers it. When I start typing the domain the URL bar says "Press TAB to search X", then you type in your search terms.

We're switching from Chrome to Firefox at work and their site-search is incredibly clunky in comparison.

It's pretty easy to manage site searches in Firefox -- go to rapgenius.com, click on dropdown in the FF search box, click on add "rap genius", and that's it. Also, you are able to set keyword to it in "manage search engines" dialog in the same dropdown, for example "rg" -- so you will be able to write just "rg song" in the address bar to search on rapgenius.

Well that's different than searching for the URL (though I would suggest using tab to search the site within Chrome). I bet RapGenius got thousands of referrals from the keyword "rapgenius.com" per day. Obviously that will come back rather quickly, but it's something a lot of the HN audience would not normally think of happening.

It happened slightly differently to Facebook

http://readwrite.com/2010/02/11/how_google_failed_internet_m...

This is a ridiculous practical weakness to the web we have created. At a technical level it is designed to be relatively decentralised and fault tolerant, but what we have built on top is anything but :(

Is it really the web's weakness? Seems like user error to me.

My browser (Chrome) shares screen real estate between its search functionality and address bar. Therefore, if I have searched "facebook" on Google but have not explicitly typed "http://facebook.com" into the address bar, Chrome remembers the "facebook" search as I start to type it out. As a user, the next most obvious action to take is to tab-complete + enter, and voila, there goes the Google search for "facebook".

When I tab-complete + enter, Firefox autocompletes it to http://www.facebook.com and then opens the URL.

Have you explicitly entered http://www.facebook.com into the address bar in the past by any chance?

Specifically, https://twitter.com/RapGenius/status/417354178189459456

Among others:

https://twitter.com/RapGenius/status/417348237222113281

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