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0 pointsdelinka8y ago0 comments

"...search on that site directly."

Not for an unbelievable number of people (according to my own anecdata.) There exist large numbers (extrapolating from aforementioned anecdata) of people who don't know you can just visit a website - they think it must first be "googled." I've witnessed on a single occasion an individual who accidentally went directly to facebook.com, didn't trust that they'd gotten facebook.com, proceeded to Google, entered 'facebook.com' in the search box, then selected the site from the search results.

I suspect (intuition via anecdata...) that much of the Pinterest's target audience has similar levels of technical awareness and ability.

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8 comments · 5 top-level

coatmatter8y ago· 1 in thread

There's definitely a large number of people who only visit sites through Google's homepage. Not the address bar or anything else (clicking links being the exception).

I worked this out by hearing about customer support calls for a new URL we had which hadn't yet been indexed by Google. All the callers having problems couldn't find the address bar. They thought the Google search box was it.

lostlogin8y ago

Not helped by it being the same thing in some browsers. I have the opposite problem - I regularly hit the ‘.’ rather than the space bar on iOS, and then the browser thinks I’m trying to go to that site rather than search for my string (words separated by a period). It’s annoying.

xg158y ago· 1 in thread

Even then the suggestion further down this thread could work: include pinterest results only if the search query contains the word "pinterest".

If people then still complain because they expect google to read their mind and provide pinterest results for completely unrelated queries, I honestly don't have much compassion for them.

(Though if google wanted to, they could even make allowances for those people via profiling - e.g., if you know user X has clicked on many pinterest results in the past, always permit those results in their queries.)

hungerstrike8y ago

It almost seems like Google can read your mind at times. They should already know whether somebody is a heavy Pinterest user or not.

vbezhenar8y ago· 1 in thread

It might be a good habit. If you're typing URL manually, you can visit some fakebook instead of facebook and lose your password. But Google will correct you in this case.

mirimir8y ago

Maybe. But it also happens the other way. If you don't block ads, anyway. The top result may give you malware, instead of what you want.

megous8y ago

So it would be a good opportunity to learn the web, for those people.

Endy8y ago

Based on what I remember of their demographics, I would guess that you're right. What scares me is the number of LinkedIn users that are so unsavvy!

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