Watching other people use a computer

Uh - but you end up going to the website right? Then it’s still stuck in your drop down.

That’s what I was thinking, but thought maybe the googling google was just a generic way of showing him googling some random company with an easy address to put into the url bar.

You’re joking, right?

Please tell me that you don’t mean that for the purposes of keeping a website address out of your history you go to Google, then actually search for, say “www.thisisnotgoatporn.com,” then follow the link to “www.thisisnotgoatporn.com.”

Because that would be ridiculous if for no other reason than the fact that you’re wasting a lot of time and keystrokes keying in the “www.” and the “.com” parts.

Yes, I know some people will do that.
FWIW, if you are using Firefox, you can go to Tools>Start Private Browsing and then there is no record at all of what you did. Whether it’s because you don’t want someone finding out what you were up to or you really just don’t want an extra address in your drop down bar, it doesn’t matter, there won’t be any history of it.

obligatory I.T. Crowd clip

I do the same and it’s not about keeping things out of my history. This is my laptop and nobody else uses it- I don’t give a shit about my history. It’s the drop-down box at the very top that I don’t want cluttered up. It’s not the history, but it stores some (on mine, right now, on firefox, there are 12) things that you’ve typed into the address bar. Like right now, mine has a few websites I visit frequently (facebook, the SDMB, wordreference, stuff like that) and a few that I just copied and pasted into there long ago because someone shared it and didn’t link it properly or something. There’s a craigslist listing for a car from like two months ago on there, for example. It’s just clutter.

So for some things, I just type them into the search box and click the link. It’s stuff I look at occasionally, but not enough to bookmark, like the Hyperbole and a Half blog or XKCD or Cracked. I like keeping my bookmarks and my drop-down thing at the top as clean as possible. It takes like a third of a second extra, which is worth it to me to not have four thousand bookmarks.

And I’ve seen people google “google”. The best was when one of my profs picture-googled “Google” in class and a picture of a lady with big giant bare boobs as the “OO” popped up. He was very confused and then typed what he was actually searching for into the address bar. He was a bit goofy.

eta: I don’t type “www.cracked.com” into the google bar- just “cracked”.

Yeah, I literally have to leave the room when my wife works on the computer. Not only does she do things about the most inefficient way possible, she shares it by mumbling to herself while she does it.

“Let me see, where did I put that file? Not in My Documents, hmmm, where could it be? Ooh, what’s this folder? . . .”

SEARCH! For all that’s holy, USE SEARCH!

On the other side, there’s fewer things more nerve wracking than demonstrating something on a projector to a room full of programmers. Every little thing you do, I swear, there’s a least one programmer who has to let you know a better way to do it, even if it has absolutely fricking nothing to do with what you’re trying to demonstrate.

click on the File menu
You can just right-click that!
type a SQL command
Why didn’t you just run that directly from the window?
paste an attachment in an e-mail
*Jeez, you coulda just created that directly from the file!

I love programmers, I really do, but half the time I felt like I was running a day care center.

::hangs head in shame::

Yep, that’s me. I have to bite my tongue and think happy thoughts whenever Mrs. Giraffe and I are co-surfing for something and she’s running the mouse. But it’s just so hard – she scrolls up and down pages by clicking on the frickin’ arrow at the top and bottom of the scroll bar! She doesn’t even drag or click on the the empty part of the bar to go down a page at a time, let alone use the scroll wheel. It’s…maddening.

Hampshire and SurrenderDorothy- you’re talking about the autocomplete cache (not the browser history).

Next time you see that goatporn or carfromlastsummeroncraigslist, just arrow key down to it so it is highlighted, and right-click and delete. Poof.

Works great for mistyped/outdated email address that want to autocomplete in Outlook, and pretty much any Windows app that uses autocomplete for typing. Select, right-click (or use delete key), and nuke it from orbit.

Nah, I know enough not to have to add www and com. But I will still punch “thisisnotgoatporn” into google and click the link from there to keep the address from imbedding in my drop down.

That doesn’t work for me. Right-clicking on a highlighted address in the address drop down list doesn’t bring up anything.

Thank Jebus. I was really worried about you for a second there. :wink:

Heh. I can’t remember the last time I used quotes.

It doesn’t work for me, either, but if I arrowed down to it and hit delete, it went away :slight_smile:

This thread also reminded me of one of my favorite Simpsons bits ever:

The two of them yelling instructions at her while she does things more and more wrong never fails to completely crack me up.

:: eye twitching ::

That makes me crazy. Most of our employees review our website regularly. They do so by typing our URL into the Google toolbar, the clicking on the Google results. This messes up our analytics to a degree because it looks like Google is driving traffic to our website, but then when you look a little closer at the metrics, you see it’s all just our sales department.

That dialog could be an exact copy of one of my neighbors. She has seen people move the mouse, click, move…and thinks she should, too, so she moves the mouse and clicks without concerning herself about what the mouse pointer is on. Shit happens and she’s mystified why.

That often happens because the URL box has been removed and/or replaced with the google toolbar (wonder how that happens?) These people have never seen an address line box, have no idea what it is used for, and see no reason why they should have one.

Thank you. I used to have a toolbar icon that would do that, but it went away in the last upgrade. Now I have the power back!

This reminds me of a YouTube link that the Dope introduced me to - forget the seires name (I’m sure some Doper will pipe up, quite possibly with a specific URL) - the series focusses on a completely computer-illiterate salesman that antagonizes the IT person with inane questions, all done in chipmunk-style voices (and is funny as hell). Anyways, after getting access to the person’s computer, the IT discovers that the salesman has all his desktop icons arranged in the shape of a penis. IT person then rearranges them (tiled alphabetically) to which clueless salesguy replies “NOOOO! I can’t find anything now! Our company website was at the tip of the penis!”

Restore the “show desktop” icon = “reduce all open windows to the taskbar”

Never surf without it.