Web search terms...

[Grant Barrett]

On Thursday, March 16, 2000, Gareth Branwyn <garethb2 at STREETTECH.COM> wrote:
>There are a number of "search ticker" sites that show you realtime Web
>searches:
>
>They are fascinating (and disturbing). The spelling is sobering: "Holy
>Bibul," "the california trale," "vanerial disease," "restarunts." It's a
>miracle people can find anything.

What I find it interesting is that

a) people try natural language queries ("Where can I find maps of Texas?") in search
engines that don't handle them

and

b) many people apparently haven't discovered that you can put what comes between the
"www." and the ".com", or even a completely formed URL, into the Location/Address
field in the browser and hit Return to go to that site. As a result, we see searches
for things such as "www.hotmail.com" and "yahoo" and "http://www.nytimes.com/". Weird.
[Although I must admit that some of this might be searches done from kiosk-mode
browsers that are supposed to display only designated pages, usually institutional or
in-house sites for a library or trade show booth or what have you. Kiosk mode usually
does not display the location bar; the best way to escape from a kiosk-mode browser is
to find that one link-to-a-link-to-a-link that takes you to a search engine. From
there, you can load dern near anything.}