Do you still Yahoo? Part 2
I had a conversation with a classmate yesterday and we got down to talking about Yahoo.
Apparently, there is now an effort to make the search bar more obvious on the Yahoo home page (URL: www.yahoo.com).
This really surprised me.
My question is: How many people are using a search engine’s home page to do a search on the Internet?
Most popular web browsers today have something called chrome search. This is the little text box next to the address text box. See picture below of the chrome search box on FireFox. This is on the top right corner of the web browser application window.
Most people would be, by now, accustomed to using the chrome search box to do Internet searches. All you need to do is to click in the search box, type in your search text and hit enter. You can do this while you are at any website. There is no more need to navigate to www.google.com or www.yahoo.com to do a web search.
So what are these Yahoo folks thinking?
Or do they think that people still go to www.yahoo.com explicitly to do a search?
I go to www.yahoo.com multiple times a day. But I do that because I like the news and informational articles. See below.
Do I go to the search box on the page and do a search after reading the articles? No. I use the chrome search feature.
Perhaps the Yahoo folks know something I don’t. Perhaps they have done some usability surveys.
The Intel anthropologist that came to our class a few weeks ago brought up a very good point: people don’t use technology in a vacuum. In this case, you don’t surf the Internet in a vacuum. You use a web browser that runs on an operating system on a physical computer. How you surf the Internet is affected by the web browser, the operating system and the computer. Who knows? Perhaps the kind of mouse you use can affect how you surf.
I am also doing a usability survey for some of the same issues. The survey is here. There is no cost to participate :-) In fact, you get a chance to win an Apple 8GB iPod Nano of the color of your choice.
Tags: anthropology, Internet, survey, usability, Yahoo