" Google has made us Stupid

I’ve been away on holiday, on a cruise at it happens. I mention that only as it is important to this story. On board there is a dedicated website that you can access to check your account, see what’s on today, book restaurants etc. The web address for this site is:

http://myholiday.pocruises.com/

Now, I know and you probably know too, that this is a local website running on a server somewhere on the boat. Unless you pay a heafty fee you don’t get access to the internet just this local website.

Don’t Search

I have an iPhone but others in our party have Android devices and on the home screen is a prominent input box with the Google "G" logo. Your eyes are drawn to this and it is natural therefore to use this as your starting point for accessing the web. If you are searching for "holiday homes in North Wales" or "Tiger prawn recipes" then this makes perfect sense. However, it does not make sense when you are expected to be going to a specific web address.

Searching for "myholiday" either gives an error because you aren’t connected to the internet or all sort of holiday links, including the prominent ads at the top. Yes, you can type in the complete web address but, in my experience, nobody ever does.

I can see why this works for Google. All those lovely ads there just waiting for you to click and more pennies in the coffers of Google but does it really work for the end user? I think not. It would be a bit like writing "Fred Bloggs, Scunthorpe" on the front of a letter and expecting it to get delivered. You need to be much more precise.

What’s the answer? I have no idea. Google aren’t going to want it to stop but it’s causing much confusion with those that I see using Android.

What you see if you got to myholiday.pocruises.com from the public internet<br>Share this:

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