The Billion Dollar Line of JavaScript: document.f.q.focus();

'Cause Google was the first company to ever think of putting the cursor in the only input[type=text] on the page onload.

This article is pretty old, and I've seen it pop up a few times on many of the other social news sites, but that isn't my problem. Something that has always bugged me is some of the ludicrous claims in the article. Take the following:

"It is quicker to type “Amazon” into Google and click on the first result than it is to type www.amazon.com into your address bar."

No chance. In fact, I am pretty confident my (essentially) computer-illiterate father could type "www." and ".com" faster than he could search, wait for the page to load, move the mouse over to the first result, and click it. I see where Altoft is trying to go with it, but his argument is poorly worded. He means the "large number of users" that don't know much about computers--or so I think he does.

I would have liked to see him talk about the integration Google <em>already</em> has with Firefox (type "ebay" into the address bar). I haven't looked into why it happens, but sometimes (like with "ebay") Google defaults to "I'm feeling lucky" results, i.e. it will take you straight to the page, but other times it gives you the search results. "scrable" takes me to a specific webpage, but "scrabble" takes me to the search listings.

This was on YC like 3 months ago...

That's really cool. It's amazing the profound effect that little UI tweaks can have. Not only in the sense that it makes software a better tool, but also in that something as simple as focusing on a textbox encourages users to use that tool in a certain way.

In this case, a way that makes Google money by the bushel-full.

I remember reading about an (pre-AOL+TW) AOL exec boast about those promotional boxes that show-up when people login/logoff AOL. He was saying that if he had a box that said 'Click here to pay $10 for absolutely nothing - that a percentage of their customers would click on it'

Related? 6% of users account for 50% of Ad clicks.

I bet you found it on jaanix :) Congrats!

I hope the "next HTML" has a way to do it declaratively, so I can disable Javascript.