Geekery: Browsers and Search Engines
Google produced a video of man-on-the-street interviews in Times Square in NYC, where they asked passersby if they knew what a browser was, and if they knew the difference between a search engine and a browser. The answer: less that eight percent of those they interviewed knew what a browser was.
Wow.
I know I'm a geek, and yes, I worked in the industry during the whole growth of the web and the invention of browsers (I remember when Netscape was new and exciting), but seriously! I'm sure you all know this already, but in case not: a browser is a program that runs on your computer, that allows you to access web sites on the internet. A search engine is a web site that runs on a search engine company's computers, which you access with your browser, and with which you can search the web.
I guess all the various search engine companies (Google, Yahoo, MSN, etc)'s efforts to get people to set their browsers (Firefox, Internet Explorer, Safari, etc) to default to their home pages are at least partly to blame for the confusion. In fact, so am I. I set my mom's Firefox (which she insists on calling "Foxfire") up for her to default to Google, because it's a good starting place for her. I've set my own browsers (yes, plural, I use three simultaneously: Firefox, Safari, and Camino, and I'm considering adding Chrome. Stopped using Opera because it was painfully slow) to default to GoodSearch.com, which makes a donation to the charity of your choice (I've set mine to donate to Peninsula Metropolitan Community Church) every time you search.
The point being, there is a pretty close link between search engines and browsers, especially as search engines have become a necessity for using the web. Back when this was all new, in the late nineties, a bunch of user interface designers at Sun (I was one of them) had a daily trivia contest. Someone had gotten a trivia-a-day calendar, and posted the question of the day to the group. It was a race to see who could answer first, and no cheating and looking it up! And then search engines came on the scene, so we added a sub-game: how quickly could you find the answer to the question on the internet? We had to state which search engines we used (my favorite at the time was Alta Vista), what query terms we tried, and list all blind alleys and failed searches as well as our successes. In retrospect, we could have undoubtedly gotten an awesome paper out of our game, and I'm sorry we never wrote and published it.
Google came on the scene a year or so into our game. This was back when Google was an experiment out of someone's dorm room at Stanford, before it became the ubergiant company it is now. It was amazing how much faster and better Google was at answering our trivia questions. It quickly became the search engine of choice for us designers (and not long thereafter, for the world.)
Speaking as a user interface designer, maybe the difference doesn't matter. Maybe, like the way I really don't care what the parts of the engine in my car are, it doesn't matter to most users what the parts of the computer interface are called. All they (or should I say we?) want to do is find information. Welcome to the Information Age indeed.
Wow.
I know I'm a geek, and yes, I worked in the industry during the whole growth of the web and the invention of browsers (I remember when Netscape was new and exciting), but seriously! I'm sure you all know this already, but in case not: a browser is a program that runs on your computer, that allows you to access web sites on the internet. A search engine is a web site that runs on a search engine company's computers, which you access with your browser, and with which you can search the web.
I guess all the various search engine companies (Google, Yahoo, MSN, etc)'s efforts to get people to set their browsers (Firefox, Internet Explorer, Safari, etc) to default to their home pages are at least partly to blame for the confusion. In fact, so am I. I set my mom's Firefox (which she insists on calling "Foxfire") up for her to default to Google, because it's a good starting place for her. I've set my own browsers (yes, plural, I use three simultaneously: Firefox, Safari, and Camino, and I'm considering adding Chrome. Stopped using Opera because it was painfully slow) to default to GoodSearch.com, which makes a donation to the charity of your choice (I've set mine to donate to Peninsula Metropolitan Community Church) every time you search.
The point being, there is a pretty close link between search engines and browsers, especially as search engines have become a necessity for using the web. Back when this was all new, in the late nineties, a bunch of user interface designers at Sun (I was one of them) had a daily trivia contest. Someone had gotten a trivia-a-day calendar, and posted the question of the day to the group. It was a race to see who could answer first, and no cheating and looking it up! And then search engines came on the scene, so we added a sub-game: how quickly could you find the answer to the question on the internet? We had to state which search engines we used (my favorite at the time was Alta Vista), what query terms we tried, and list all blind alleys and failed searches as well as our successes. In retrospect, we could have undoubtedly gotten an awesome paper out of our game, and I'm sorry we never wrote and published it.
Google came on the scene a year or so into our game. This was back when Google was an experiment out of someone's dorm room at Stanford, before it became the ubergiant company it is now. It was amazing how much faster and better Google was at answering our trivia questions. It quickly became the search engine of choice for us designers (and not long thereafter, for the world.)
Speaking as a user interface designer, maybe the difference doesn't matter. Maybe, like the way I really don't care what the parts of the engine in my car are, it doesn't matter to most users what the parts of the computer interface are called. All they (or should I say we?) want to do is find information. Welcome to the Information Age indeed.