Hacker News Reader

Comment by inflatableDodo | Hacker News Reader

Just tried searching for 'firefox' as a quick test.

I do get a page of Firefox results, but I also get a box titled 'People also ask' after the first four results, with the very first item being; 'Is Mozilla Firefox Safe to Download?' I also get a box at the bottom of the page titled 'Web Browsers,' with the first item in that box being Chrome. And Firefox is just not in that box at all. Not a popular enough web browser to include in the box marked web browsers when searched for by name, it would seem. On the other hand, UC Browser makes the list after Chrome, Opera and Safari, which I hadn't even heard of until today, but is apparently by Alibaba.

View on HN

> And Firefox is just not in that box at all.

If you search for Chrome, Chrome will not show up in that box either. And the first browser in that box is, guess what, Firefox. You just searched for it, why include it in the box?

UC Browser is pretty popular in Asia. Statcounter reports 3% market share worldwide, right between Samsung Internet and IE.

>If you search for Chrome, Chrome will not show up in that box either. And the first browser in that box is, guess what, Firefox. You just searched for it, why include it in the box?

Oh, good catch, you are right. Is just a bad title for the box and does not appear to be in any way nefarious. 'Other Web Browsers' would be a lot less confusing.

Am still cocking an eyebrow at 'Is Mozilla Firefox Safe to Download?' though.

It isn't safe to download for the person asking that question.

I'm not sure if anything changed in a day, but I'm not getting that result at all (in fact, I'm not getting a "did you mean Chrome" either). The latter isn't explainable by me, but for the former... well, remember the search results are tailored to you (that's another pandora's box about echo chambers in itself) so perhaps you've been searching for more security-oriented things and that affects your results. In my case, the first page was mostly official Firefox links, wikipedia, and the very last result of the first page was "Google Just Gave 2 Billion Chrome Users A Reason To Switch To Firefox" so it doesn't seem like there's anything awry going on here.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com