Hacker News Reader

Comment by ramon156 | Hacker News Reader

> type google > get anything but google

It's an interesting case. The kneejerk reaction is "it should return google.com". But really... why? If I wanted google.com, I'd add the .com. If I wanted to search for something I wouldn't search for google first.

I guess my top candidates would be: wikipedia page about google, google stock chart, recent news about google. google.com would never be a result I want to click. The current results are not amazing, but also do we care what the results for that one are? It's like someone telling you "cow" and expecting you'll know the context of what they're thinking of at the moment. Maybe a heading like "I have no idea what you're on about, here are some clickable ideas: google news, google stock price, ..." would be the best solution?

I was amazed looking at people entering the first part of the domain into the search bar, then searching and clicking the first result. That was before chrome had the integrated google search in the address bar.

I had multiple people (albeit small sample size) who went to google.com, entered the domain they wanted (e.g. news.ycomb) then clicked the first suggestion which ran the actual search and then clicked on the first hit.

While if you wanted to do so you would probably just add the .com and skip the middle man, I know of quite a few people who use search to get to sites even though they know their URLs.

That isn’t to say I hate what this site is doing, I think it is quite neat, but I do think we have to consider that there are more ways used to get to Google than just entering Google.com

Those people should be educated how to create and then (re)use bookmarks/favorites. It's a better tool than searching the same domain every day or multiple times per day.

It should absolutely return the actual thing you search for if it exists, and as the first result.

It would require an extraordinary circumstance to justify anything else, like if a thing exists, but overwhelmingly the entire net is full of some other reference that is probably what everyone is looking for.

The overwhelming majority of people typing "google" into a search are not looking for the Wikipedia page about google.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com