Egyptian repairman outranks Google in search | Hacker News Reader

Egyptian repairman outranks Google in search

bbc.co.uk

My biggest WTF with this story is that people search Google for... Google.

I don't get it.

This is a very common question and the answer gives an insight into how mind works.

The following explanation applies only for the unconscious-mind (aka the fast-thinking mind from the seminal book by Daniel Kahneman):

People are used to searching on the Google-Homepage so much that they forget that the search is now integrated into Browsers and Computers.

So what happens is that when someone wants to search for information, the first thing they look for is the interface that they have used a lot (which is Google-Homepage). Now fast-thinking-mind tries to go to Google-Homepage.

So they type "google" into the browser search bar (which is what the unconscious-mind does when it is looking for some webpage) and Browser-search-bar-Google opens Google-Homepage.

The end result is you see a lot of people typing Google into Google search. However what is actually happening is that people are looking for Google-Homepage into Browser-Search-Bar.

But most computers are fast and should autocomplete that to google.com from the browser's history long before the user has time to press enter.

Also: am I the only one who has searching from the location bar perma-blocked? I don't want internal servers when misspelled to result in Google traffic, nor do I want my privacy invaded for every location I type.

Also there's a reason proper browsers has a search bar.

You can't search for URLs via the top search bar so whenever I want to do a search on a URL, I type in google which searches Google for google for me and then I paste the URL into the Google search bar.

I do the same many times. Here is another workaround:

Go to Settings -> Manage Search Engines -> Other Search Engines then enter the following 3 fields:

"Google Search Shortcut" "g" "{google:baseURL}search?q=%s"

Now you can just type in "s " (the s key followed by a space) and it will search whatever else you put in there.

I don't actually use this much, but it's there if needed.

Because TLDs are archaic.

So I just type Google into the bar at the top and there I am! For the average man that is.

You can see the start of the story here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9620739

And it looks like Google has removed the user homepage URLs from all Google+ pages while they get it fixed.

Perhaps this is an attempt by Google to show it's not anti-competitive?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com