Good morning
Duh. I normally type URLs in browsers' address boxes: a search engine's
URL if I want to search the web. Yesterday, though, I absent-mindedly
skipped this part and typed the search words directly in the Firefox
address box: I immediately got a relevant page.
Browsers call up a search engine if you just type words in their address
box: Explorer calls search MSN, giving you a list of results - Firefox
calls Google in "I feel lucky" mode, which opens the first site of the
results list directly.
For instance, if I type my surname in the address box, I get my personal
page at www.digitaldivide.net through Google with Firefox, and I get a
search.msn list of links, starting with www.almansi.net a site in Arabic
(*), with Explorer.
Shouldn't this boost in theory the market share of search.msn, compared
to Google and to yahoo search (which doesn't get summoned by any
browser, apparently), as Explorer still remains the most used browser?
And yet search.msn apparently remains the least used of the 3.
Maybe there aren't enough absent-minded people yet who type search words
in the address box of their browser and find out that it also works. But
once this becomes more widely known, will it boost the use of
search.msn, or on the contrary, drive more people to use Firefox as a
browser? Have their been studies on this search engine preference of
browsers?
(*) (I wish I understood Arabic - I was not aware that there were
Almansi's in Arabic-speaking countries). The called version of
search.msn seems to vary according to the language version of Explorer:
my Explorer being French, it calls the French version of search-msn.
Firefox on the other hand calls google.com (though in normal mode I get
automatically transefered to google.ch)
cheers
Claude
--
Claude Almansi
claude.almansi_at_bluewin.ch
http://www.adisi.ch
http://www.digitaldivide.net/blog/claude
_______________________________________________
DIGITALDIVIDE mailing list
DIGITALDIVIDE@mailman.edc.org
http://mailman.edc.org/mailman/listinfo/digitaldivide
To unsubscribe, send a message to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with the word UNSUBSCRIBE
in the body of the message.
