Re:How much longer will we trust Google’s search results?
by smichel17 on Friday January 24, 2020 @01:38PM
(#22141139)
I've seen people type "example" into the address bar, hit enter, then click the Google link to example.com, without realizing that they could just add ".com" to the end of their initial query and go directly to their destination.
Re:How much longer will we trust Google’s search results?
by praxulus on Friday January 24, 2020 @03:24PM
(#22142089)
If you have a typo in the name, Google will fix it for you, whereas your browser will happily take you to a domain that is probably owned by a scammer.
Re:How much longer will we trust Google’s search results?
by xp84 on Friday January 24, 2020 @04:00PM
(#22142414)
One could argue that since Google is JUST as happy to take money from scammers for an ad for the keyword WellsFrago as the Registry would be to sell the domain WellsFrago dot com ... I'm not sure either approach is technically safer than the other if you're prone to typos. I think (gasp) bookmarking the important sites you need is the only safe approach.
Re:How much longer will we trust Google’s search results?
by takk309 on Friday January 24, 2020 @02:01PM
(#22141339)
My wife does this all the time. If she wants to go to Prime video she types "Amazon Prime Video" into her address bar then clicks the first Google result, often the ad for Prime Video.
Re:How much longer will we trust Google’s search results?
by unlinked_dll on Friday January 24, 2020 @09:18PM
(#22144203)
To be fair, the actual page navigation to amazon prime video is not straightforward.
Re:How much longer will we trust Google’s search results?
by sdoering on Friday January 24, 2020 @03:14PM
(#22142000)
If I do not like a company but need to visit their site, I also do this just to increase the cost for said company as Google Ads are 'cost per click'.
Re:How much longer will we trust Google’s search results?
by xp84 on Friday January 24, 2020 @03:58PM
(#22142380)
^ This works really well except for if the company you don't like is Google :D
Oh, I tried an alternate approach and it didn't work... Search bing for Google and you just get a second bing. https://imgur.com/a/YntBiYc
Re:How much longer will we trust Google’s search results?
by bluGill on Friday January 24, 2020 @02:49PM
(#22141802)
I started doing that years back. I'm a bad speller and sometimes the url is example.net where example.com exists as some scam that I wouldn't want but looks like the real example.net. Google will correct my spelling and find the correct string to put after the name.
I don't believe that it's the masses looking for e-commerce sites. I think it's that Google wants people to click on e-commerce sites because it makes money off of those ads. And even if someone doesn't click on a sponsored link to an e-commerce site, that click still reinforces in their mind that Google is the place to start shopping.
There was a comment on HN yesterday where someone wrote something like, "Did you know there are countries where people who want to buy things just go to amazon.com directly and don't search for their item in Google?" I was floored. It never occurred to me that if I want to buy something at amazon.com that I would involve Google in any way. But there must be legions of people who do this, or that person wouldn't have made that statement.
At the same time, I think that Google falls down at this kind of lead generation because it allows so much automation that it can't be trusted.
I just put "rocket to mars" in Google and the top results are ads for Wal-Mart and Michael's.
To be fair, the duck isn't much better. I just put "f-14 fighter jet" into Duck and got an ad for "Fighter Jets For Sale near you" with a link to an auto repair shop.