Millions of people around the world don’t know what a browser is, they don’t know the difference between a search bar and an address bar and they sure don’t follow the finer points of Google’s many little changes it makes to their search results. They go to the Google and they type in Facebook login. Then they click on the links that show up, sometimes with very humorous results.
Google today introduced a new feature that will let mainstream users get search results to hold still and remain where they expect them to be. It’s called Stars and it’s essentially pinning a link permanently to the top of a search results page for a certain query.
Above: Probably not how this feature will generally be used.
When one of our blog posts showed up high in a Google search last month for “Facebook login” we saw hundreds of thousands of confused people stream into our site and post typo-ridden comments like “I WANT MY FAFEBOOK!” Many of them couldn’t tell that they were visiting a blog post about Facebook, and with Facebook Connect login, and not Facebook.com itself. Even though we said as much in big bold letters after the first few thousand of them.
Thousands more people visited the site to gawk at those users and their comments. A common response was for web designers to say “we must not be serving mainstream users very well if they are confused in a situation like this.”
Enter features like Google Stars. It’s a great idea. No dumbing-down the internet for those lucky relative few of us who do know how to use it, just some additional options for those who are still beginning to learn. Expect to see more developments like this as regular web use becomes a more common experience for non technical people. This may be an example of a best-case solution.
Update: Several people in comments have said they don’t think Stars are going to work for mainstream users, either. What do you think?
