This is a cruel world.
http://www.google.com/insights/search/#cmpt=q

Yeah, people like search engines…

My gf does this all the time. I tried to talk some sense into her, but that failed miserably. So I started not to mind.

Anyway, that’s more the excuse to take $$$ for SEO :)

[quote post=”2284″]“I have an optical mouse and a multi-colored surface. I’m afraid that multiple colors/shades of my desk are confusing my mouse. Should I get a single colored surface?” WTF![/quote]

Ah, but see – at least he is trying. I have a guy in the office who basically wants a new wireless mouse every couple of weeks because “it stopped working”. I have no clue what his deal is since the mouse work perfectly for me. But once he decides a mouse is broken he will refuse to use claiming that it will stop working again at some point. Sigh.. But he is a director, and boss told me to just keep him happy so just I order him a new mouse whenever he needs one amd usually give the “broken” one to someone else. All the people who inherited these were very happy with them and no one has ever complained about it suddenly stopping to work. :P

[quote post=”2284″]Apparently, they (mistakenly) believe that by going to Google and typing the webpage in the search instead of in the address bar, they get past the security measures that are tracking their internet usage. Since they don’t type it directly into the address bar, they believe there’s no way to track what they’re doing.[/quote]

LOL! But this is not the reason people I know are doing it. We don’t track the web traffic at my company so there is no reason for them to do this. I have also seen my students do this, and also family members do it in their own house – I mean they clearly can’t be worried about Sysadmin snooping on their web browsing habits.

I can answer a part of this question for you, surprisingly, though not all of it.

I actually asked a few people at work why they would do this, as it was a waste of time, and stupid. I didn’t phrase it that way exactly, but I think it might have come across.

Apparently, they (mistakenly) believe that by going to Google and typing the webpage in the search instead of in the address bar, they get past the security measures that are tracking their internet usage. Since they don’t type it directly into the address bar, they believe there’s no way to track what they’re doing.

I laughed for a good long time when they told me that and the rest of the office agreed.

I have noticed this as well, but have hoped that I was misinterpreting the future of technology savvy individuals.

While this means that a good chunk of new lusers will be exactly that, lusers I hope that none of them will ever be at a level of one of our older users who called us the other day with the following problem:

“I have an optical mouse and a multi-colored surface. I’m afraid that multiple colors/shades of my desk are confusing my mouse. Should I get a single colored surface?” WTF!

[quote post=”2284″]Interestingly, over in Japan most advertisements in trains, on TV etc. show a little text box with the company/product/service name etc. entered in and a button labeled “Search” next to it with a mouse cursor over it.[/quote]

Interesting… I never been to Japan so I’m not sure how it works over there, but could it be because of the disjunction between the domain name and the actual company logo/product name? I imagine a lot of companies might use western alphabet for domain names (eg. sony.jp or something like that) but their company logo (or the brand name of the product) might be in kanji or something like that.

Anyway, this is a wild speculation and I’m probably wrong. :P

Interestingly, over in Japan most advertisements in trains, on TV etc. show a little text box with the company/product/service name etc. entered in and a button labeled “Search” next to it with a mouse cursor over it. In other words, instead of printing the URL they ask people to search for this term. I wonder how often it doesn’t work as expected :).

[quote post=”2284″]Even drags the scroll bars about instead of using the scroll wheel [/quote]

Yeah, my aunt was doing that. I demonstrated the scroll wheel magic to her. She used it for five minutes and then went back to clicking and dragging. Sigh…

[quote post=”2284″]I have a parallel problem – the users I work with know the address bar alright, they just don’t know the URL of the netapp they use all the time.[/quote]

Yeah, all the users who do not do the google thing rely on the auto-complete memory of the address bar. For example, if you are in my office, and you want to access the timesheet web-application all you need to do is to type in “time” into the search bar and press enter. The app is actually hosted in the datacenter but we have a nice VPN tunel so it appears like a local server.

What do my users do? They click on the arrow next to the address bar and start scrolling down looking for it. The funny thing is that they were doing that the day we actually set up that domain name. I was like “no you have to type it in, you never been there before”.

Blank stare… Turns back to the monitor…

Scroll, scroll, scroll…

Aaaargh!

[quote post=”2284″]And btw Luke I’m not getting notifications on comments here tho I am subscribed, hmm. Something going on on your end[/quote]

Sigh… Fucking dreamhost. Never a dull moment with these guys.

The Add bookmarks here extension helps with FF keywords because you can set the extensions preferences to allow ya to add key words when ya bookmark something.

Matt`

Even drags the scroll bars about instead of using the scroll wheel

A cool trick I use is to enable autoscroll (where you middle-click and a little arrow like graphic appears and you scroll just by moving the mouse up or down ), in about:config set general.autoScroll to true.

A lot easier for me because I read lots online and my finger gets tired, this way i can set the screen scrolling about the same speed i read and don’t have to mess with it. lol

And btw Luke I’m not getting notifications on comments here tho I am subscribed, hmm. Something going on on your end,

I have a parallel problem – the users I work with know the address bar alright, they just don’t know the URL of the netapp they use all the time. Sit them down in front of a rebuilt computer/fresh login and they can never remember, even though they use the URL as the name of the thing in conversation every day.

In reference to point #2, I can understand typing in the ‘www’ as some sites don’t work without it (misconfigured usually).