- Entering a query that is sent to Google by one of many channels (google.com, browser omnibox, Android omnibox)
- Choosing a result from a Google search
- Pages following guidelines defined by Google
- With ads displayed, published and managed through Google-owned platforms
- Atop standards initially implemented in Google Chrome, with design influenced by them
- Displayed on a browser made by Google
- Retrieved through protocols often designed with influence from Google
- From an IP resolved by Google Public DNS
- The client device is running on an operating system made by Google
I have seen my father type a web address into a google search page because he doesn’t understand that he can use the location field to go directly to that address. I corrected this behavior the first time I saw it. He was doing it again the next time I visited.
This is a man with a high level of education and a healthy mind. He’s utterly lost on many of the basic concepts of his computer. The thing is, it works for him and I would never know he was making this mistake without watching him because he still gets the desired result in a roundabout way.
- It's a tax on the services you use who have to pay to be the top result, you burden companies you patronize when you do this. When you search for Dell.com in search and click the top link for Dell, Dell just had to pay a couple quarters to not have you redirected to a seedy scam site instead. Times millions for every other person who does this.
- Google Ads allow advertisers to spoof addresses, and display a different destination address than where clicking the link actually takes you. I've seen amazon.com, bestbuy.com, and even, hilariously, youtube.com hijacked in very authentic-looking malicious Google Ads at the top of Google Search. For security reasons, you should never, ever click on a Google Ad.
I also just searched "Best Museums in Las Vegas" on Google and Duck Duck go, and DDG does not produce as many quality results in the top 10 as Google. They do make up for it, if you are doing a really micro search, because they list soooooo many more results on the first page. But they are definitely still vulnerable to Groupon spam in a way Google searches are not.
Read The Inmates are Running the Asylum, and you might understand that better. It helped me to see how pathetically unhelpful and badly designed interfaces are everywhere, something I accepted and took for granted before.
A couple of metaphors he uses, there or in About Face: Programmers are like those into extreme sports, revelling in the difficulties of working with computers, but most people aren't like that. When they board an aeroplane, they want to sit down and get where they're going without concerning themselves with the details. Programmers head for the cockpit.
Probably something similar holds for Amazon.
Or DDG it.
Many of the results do not include both of these quoted strings. So Google went from discarding your search terms and requiring quotes, to even discarding your quoted terms. I had to fire up duckduckgo to complete my search, which is something I never use but I had no choice.
If you asked them, they probably think Google is the internet, and if you have to find anything, you have to go to Google to find it.
I'll admit I have no proof of this, but I've found, generally that the non-technical individuals I know, have incredible poor working knowledge of the internet. I take as my primary evidence though the masses vulnerability to really stupid and easily caught scams, spoof websites, click bait, and spam emails.
As a technical user, I'm constantly baffled that people fall for this crap. So if people really are that incomprehensibly ignorant, I'll bet they don't' even really know what a google is and why they use other than it's all they know and they'd be lost without it.
If the general public can't figure out no one is going to hand them a million bucks from nigeria, how the hell can they figure out you don't have to use Google?
I use DDG btw. I find their results fantastically good. So good that I can't even use google. The spam, the adds, the poor results. I cant' take it. I also can't handle that google returns different results on different computers.
I get the same results on DDG every time i make the same search. I've gotten lazy and started performing searches for things instead of typing in the address because it's consistent and faster.