I recently wrote a little web app for online evaluation of college presidents. Went pretty well, we’ve received some decent feedback, but one person consistently could not access the evaluation. I figured maybe it was an old browser that didn’t support 128-bit SSL or something, so asked for the browser name and version. The answer came back: Netscape Google.

Hrm.

Ah … okay. Hm. Netscape Google.

This one had me stumped. Eventually the user just went to someone else’s desk and the evaluation worked fine, but I remained puzzled. Netscape Google. wtf?

A coworker may have answered that question. She reminded me of a problem I had a year or two ago: instead of entering a URL into their browser’s location bar, people would go to a search engine or directory like Google or Yahoo!, enter the URL in the search box, and go to the first site that turned up in the results.

Try it. It works surprisingly well. And many people use the web that way. Really. I see it over and over again.

What we suspect was happening with our “Netscape Google” user was that their browser (who knows whether it was really Netscape) was configured to open to Google when launched. They entered the URL for the evaluation in the search box, but since the only place that URL was ever published was in the letter the evaluators received, Google returned no hits.

We haven’t confirmed this with the user, but it does make sense.

The fact that our logs are riddled with URLs in search queries tells me that this is a fairly pervasive problem, but I still don’t know what to do about it. If nothing else, it reminds me that most people out there think about the Internet in terms very different from those to which I am accustomed. People for whom the Internet is an application that can be installed on their computer (AOL, anyone?). Who think that Google is their browser, or at least a part of it (isn’t it?). If you don’t understand that your browser is not the Web itself, why would you bother to upgrade?

I’m not sure how to climb inside this user’s head. It’s a very alien experience. But I have to do it. Because for every bit of code I write, every navigation scheme that I dream up, Netscape Google is at the other end, actually trying to use it.