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Comment by netc | Hacker News Reader

Once I went to Stanford to attend Donald Knuth's Annual Christmas Lecture. During the talk he wanted to show some search query on google. What he did next was interesting. He typed yahoo.com in a browser's address bar and then searched for google on yahoo's search to reach to google!!

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When I worked at Encyclopedia Britannica in the late 90s the two top queries on our portal (at the time it was ebig.com which then became eblast.com and then britannica.com) were "yahoo.com" and "sex". I brought this up at a executive level meeting after someone spent several minutes talking about how people came to our site to do serious research on the Internet. It made for a nice awkward silence.

That had to have been a joke - that's a common old person meme in IT.

Definitely not a joke. Well, perhaps that specific instance is, but at Yahoo! many of the most common search terms were domains; one argument had internally for not putting cursor focus in the search bar was precisely because people just used it as if it were the address bar, and the appetite to support that use case was low. (Source: ex-Yahoo! staff, albeit not in search and with a fallible memory).

it's a meme but i've also seen it happen.

Why and why it's interesting?

Because even the people who invented modern computing and have a complete understanding of how the internet works, are still vulnerable to the bad habits that dictate our ability to use the internet.

I think what he is also saying is that Yahoo had a built in buffer, that they had to work really hard to fuck up. Because even Genius's turned to Yahoo to Google things for a long time.

Also anytime a genius can't do a basic task it is "interesting". Viral sites like Buzzfeed love spreading stories about how Steven Hawking couldn't figure out how to use his Comcast remote control.

I totally agree Knuth is a genius, but he does not look like an early adopter at all. He does not use email and I would not be surprised if he does not have a mobile phone (not even a non-smart one).

I think that if I had seen him typing google.com in the yahoo search bar, I'd have just thought: of course.

That's an interesting take. I never thought that he didn't use email because he was behind the times. I thought he used email for a period and then gave it up in 1995 (or something ridiculously early) like that because he was so ahead of the curve he could see where it was going and didn't want to waste his time.

Actually, you are right. This is the exact quote:

> I have been a happy man ever since January 1, 1990, when I no longer had an email address. I'd used email since about 1975, and it seems to me that 15 years of email is plenty for one lifetime.

My point was that he does not really care. I'm sure he still follows very closely some advancements, but he is not the kind of people I expect to be very informed about the new IDE, Javascript framework or web standard, for example. He is happy programming in a chalkboard.

> still vulnerable to the bad habits

Doesn't it seem more likely it was a joke?

It totally could have been. But if I'm focused on giving a presentation, I've been known to subconsciously do some dumb things when on my computer, so it could have been him just not devoting any attention to what he was doing.

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