Searchception

https://blog.mojeek.com/2025/04/searchception.html

15•Sami_Lehtinen•10mo ago

Comments

treetalker•10mo ago

> We call this phenomenon searchception: the illusion created by the merging of browsers (and operating systems) with search engines, where every attempt to go somewhere online loops back into a search event. Events that can tracked, filtered, and monetised.

esafak•10mo ago

This article is 15 years too late. It's old hat and search engines are dying.

And combining the two was a good idea: the browser can detect when you're entering a URL.

darkwater•10mo ago

Unless is a domain that's not supported. An edge case, but it still frustrates me.

In any case the real point they made was that it was a way to get traffic and hook people to their search engine, showing ads in our faces.

weinzierl•10mo ago

It was a good idea for Google but it was never a good idea for the user. We should have used the 15 years to raise awareness about phishing risks and I believe it would have been a lot easier to educate users about two distinct fields than teaching them why it may be OK to enter a half remembered fragment of a name to get some entertainment but that it is very risky if you do it with the name of your bank.

janalsncm•10mo ago

I don’t see how that increases the phishing risk. If the user mistypes a url, DNS doesn’t have any anti-spam mechanisms. If they mistype part of a url, Google can correct it.

Whether or not they do so in practice is another question of course and there are well publicized examples of them failing.

If what you’re saying was correct then preventing most phishing emails would simply be a matter of “educating users”. I believe at scale that is an impossible task.

weinzierl•10mo ago

The point is that you rely on the search engine to correct it properly.

janalsncm•10mo ago

Omni bar solves an obvious problem: the vast majority of the time showing a DNS error is way less useful than guessing where the user meant to go. That’s the alternative.

If I set my default search engine to Mojeek and type in “spotify” will they not suggest spotify.com? If I type in “sp<tab><enter>” is that taking away my agency from potentially going to spootify.com instead?

I am game for a conversation on the power of defaults and monopolies but that’s very different from saying suggestions are bad because people should just remember everything.

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