Google has announced (somewhat early, and amongst other things) the top Australian searches of 2009.
Most popular searches of 2009
YouTube
Hotmail
eBay
MySpace
Yahoo
Gmail
Bebo
Seek
So plenty of people search for Google in Google, despite the idiocy in doing so, and more significantly, the inherent dangers:
9 replies on “Searching for Google”
[…] This post was mentioned on Twitter by Daniel Bowen and Mark O'Meara, ferrous. ferrous said: LOL @ the vid. :-D RT @danielbowen: Seems people still haven't learnt the dangers of searching Google for "Google" http://tr.im/Gypk […]
I’ve been into our server room several times and was always incredibly disappointed that Richmond wasn’t in there.
For people who have a little google search box at the top of their browser, they may well not know they are using google or any search engine there. And I bet many users are not even familiar with typing URL’s in directly. And for that matter it may be as quick a way for getting to the google home page as typing http://www.google.com in the address box, and it might bring up a list of other interesting google pages that cannot be easilly found by other means.
All? of them only need a .com and they will come up. Why search for them? Perhaps I lack empathy and need to think like a new user.
Fair point Anon, though in Firefox (and others IIRC, though I don’t have a recent IE open right now) the search box is fairly clearly marked as being Google.
Yeah I’m with anon on this, the reason google is there is because of the little search box up the top, and/or browsers automatically using google to search if google without the .com is punched into the address bar.
From my experience most people have no idea the address bar is even interactive…
Sometimes you get people like me who type in google just to see what they get. I like to see the number of hits it gets.
On Firefox (and later versions of IE if you set it up right, IIRC), when you type a word in the URL field and hit return, it basically equivalent to typing it into Google and clicking the “I’m feeling lucky” button, though sometimes it will turn up search results instead… at Google. It saves keystrokes.
Normal way to get to Nicole Kidman’s IMDb page:
1: Go to http://www.imdb.com and wait for it to load
2: Enter “Nicole Kidman” into the search box and wait for the search results to load.
3: Click Nicole Kidman’s name and go to her IMDb page.
Easy way:
1: Enter “imdb kidman” in the URL bar on Firefox and go directly to her IMDb page.
In general, the list tells us that a lot of users are still unfamiliar with even the basic functionality of browsers.