Why people search for "Yahoo" on Google

[pne]

Why do people search for "Yahoo" or "yahoo.com" (or, for that matter, things such as "www.espn.com") on Google?

Raymond Chen has a look at this question. Summary:

A lot of people simply don't care to learn the difference between the search box and the address bar. "If I type what I want into this box here, I sometimes get a strange error message. But if I type it into that box there, then I get what I want. Therefore, I'll use that box there for everything."

I didn't know people did that! But then, I'm a propeller-head nerdy geek, not Joe Random User.

Comments

[darth-spacey.livejournal.com]

I do it accidentally from time to time with Internet Explorer, either by absent-mindedly entering a URL in the search text field of Google.com (my usual home page), or more often by entering an address into the Google Toolbar instead of into the Address Bar.

Since switching to Opera, this does not happen. The integration of customisable search facilities into the Address Bar means that I can happily have a blank page as my home page, and that the Google Toolbar is virtually useless to me.

we see it a lot

[hashbangperl.livejournal.com]

in fact it is one way we (http://www.pukkaplants.co.uk) know that offline advertising is working - people search on the domain name. We see it jump whenever we do magazine and other non web ads or send out catalogues.

Re: we see it a lot

[pne.livejournal.com]

Ah, and you can tell "typed the domain name in a search box" from "typed the domain name in the adress bar" by checking the referrer, I suppose?

Re: we see it a lot

[hashbangperl.livejournal.com]

pretty much, although they are both largely the same.

People type search keywords in the address bar, and urls into the google homepage.

Try not to think about it too much other than as handy for seeing how the noobs have found you.

Re: we see it a lot

[darth-spacey.livejournal.com]

More than that. It is possible to determine which search terms lead to your site (via Google or some other search engine that uses a GET method and includes the search terms in the URI).

Re: we see it a lot

[pne.livejournal.com]

Ah, I think I've seen the effect of that on some pages which highlight the search term(s) when I've reached the page through a Google search.

Presumably they do this analysis of the referrer URL for well-known search engine formats to extract the search terms.

[spongebobjess.livejournal.com]

I DON"T KNOW BUT IT PISSES ME OFF! Jon does that, too. Makes less than no sense...

SBj

[elgrande.livejournal.com]

Of course, I know the difference and I usually type url's in the "right" box. But I think sometimes I don't because I can't any disadvantage it brings along. Like when I was originally looking for something on google and then decide to use yahoo, why would I switch to the other box? And an advantage I see in using google for such stuff is that you don't always have to remember if it's a .com domain or a .org domain.

[fledchen.livejournal.com]

I've occasionally hit the tab button too many times and not realized that my cursor was in the search box instead of the address bar.

[ibneko.livejournal.com]

Hm, I search for urls occationally because my default home page is google (customized version... which loads much slower. XP), and unfortunately, google auto-focuses my cursor in their search box when it finishes loading, which results in what I type going there (if I'm typing too fast), or I just get too lazy to shift-tab until I reach the address bar...

[allegrox.livejournal.com]

When you type an incomplete URL in Firefox, it uses Google to find the rest of it and (hopefully) send you to the right place. I don't know if the referer would indicate this (probably not, assuming you're redirected by Firefox rather than Google), but it at least affects Google's count.