OK, I wasn’t going to bother putting tech crap and this blog because there are easily several gabillion blogs out there all claiming to be the next Bill Gates, but one thing struck me yesterday.
Everyone uses Google (well duh…). Why, though? Answer, because it’s so darned simple. Look at it. Page loads instantly, pop in a search term and kablam, there are the 198,000,000 results on ant farms. Let’s just step back to that for a second. It’s simple. One thing I particularly, like, is… [fanfare and drum roll please]… when you load the page, the cursor is automatically in the search box. So literally, in my browser, to do a search I just go…
ALT + D (puts cursor in URL bar)
G, Enter (shortcut, loads Google)
Search Term, Enter
Blam. The reason I say this is recently I found www.dictionary.co.uk. I had been using Dictionary.com but me being the patriotic soul that I am thought, hey I know, I’ll use the English equivalent (besides, we all know the Yanks butcher the English language anyway…). So I’m at work, playing with my satellite images (well actually trying to figure out the Hough transform) and come across a word I don’t know.
Abscissas.
So I fire up the browser, ALT+D to get in the url, type dictionary + CTRL/SHIFT/ENTER (to add www. and .co.uk – don’t have a handy dandy shortcut setup yet) and then my search term, Abscillas.
Except instead of searching… I’ve really pissed off my browser because the focus of the cursor wasn’t in the search box. So I’ve got to move my right hand, find the cordless mouse (which is hidden under a stack of papers, banana peels and empty Diet Coke bottles), find where on the cursor 17″ screen the cursor is, move it to the search box, click, let go off mouse and re-enter the search term. (And before any of wiseguys pipe up that I could probably have Tabbed to it, yes I could, but given the fact they don’t put the focus on the search box, I’m guessing the chances of tabbing to it pretty simply aren’t gonna happen…).
It’s a very simple and quite pointless thing to mention, but it seems to me, that if you run any sort of search engine, or even a search page, where people have purposely gone to that page to perform a search, then well, PUT THE FREAKING CURSOR IN THE FREAKING SEARCH FORM. It ain’t that difficult!
P.S. For all those that want to know, Abscissas means: “The coordinate representing the position of a point along a line perpendicular to the y-axis in a plane Cartesian coordinate system.”. W3rd.