Comment by grose
3 years ago
Remember AOL keywords? They basically had their own private DNS alternative. Every commercial on TV for a website would say "AOL keyword <xyz>!" instead of the actual URL. I guess it was a lot less scary for your average internet user to type in "nick" instead of "http://www.nick.com". I feel like we still kind of have the "URLs are hard" problem. I've noticed a lot of ads in Japan tell the users to search (presumably Google) for a specific phrase, and buying the adwords for that is more or less the modern equivalent of paying for an AOL keyword. Search was really rough back then (although it's gone full circle into shit again I feel), and the URL bar UX wasn't quite figured out yet. Will users be able to adapt to wacky new TLDs or will we be stuck with .com forever because it's recognizable as a domain name? Do people still type "www."? Is the app store the modern equivalent of AOL channels? Sometimes I wonder if we're stuck in an infinite cycle of reinventing AOL.
> Do people still type "www."?
From my experience, yes.
I am getting merried next month - we have a wedding website via "with joy", which had a URL a bit too long to fit on our wedding invites, so I set up a redirect of "wedding.surname.tld" - the amount of people who messaged us saying the website didn't work, and it turns out they were putting "www." beforehand was staggering (until I added that as a redirect too).
If you are ever in a tech support role and have to see how people use computers, it’s actually horrific.
I think anyone working UX should spend 3-6 months minimum in tech support every couple of years. I imagine the value of those learnings would vastly outweigh any useability studies or testing.
2 replies →
I have an email that is firstname@lastname.tld when I tell it to people, or tech support they always first assume I’m an idiot and really meant to say firstlast@gmail.com
The tld isn’t com there’s no g in the entire address, but people have a hard time understanding that such a thing is a real email address. I do happen to have that gmail address also, but my name is uncommon and not the easiest to spell, so as long as they get my last name and tld right I’ll get the email if they send it to my vanity domain.
11 replies →
In Kiwi browser (which after my tests seems to be the best Android browser: chome but with good / old way to scroll cards + ublock) you can make a personalized tab with links to pages. When you try to add a new page it auto suggests http adress - not httpS. So dont blame it always on users :)
Similar thing happened to us. I had the www redirect but used a .wedding TLD. On the invites I even put the entire “http://<domain>.wedding/“ hoping it’d be clear. I’d say a majority of people didn’t recognize that it was a web address and assumed we didn’t have a website.
To be fair “.com” would probably have convinced more of them.
“.wedding” is obviously some cheeky made up thing…
2 replies →
not https?
I suppose that could also be an indication that they haven't typed in a URL in a very long time.
A shocking (to me) number of people I work with don't know the URLs of websites they visit every day or that they can go directly to a site by typing in the address in "the search bar". And I mean people who use their computers for a living, not the "smartphone generation" or strangers to the web.
Indeed.
Me: Hey checkout <website>.com
Them: type <website> without .com in address bar, click on search results link that may or may not be correct.
1 reply →
In cases like this I'd just make a QR code of the url
Then your tech support simply changes to guiding people in the use of QR codes.
29 replies →
having www. is a nice quixk way of saying "this is a website address" without having to say it.
It's possible to create your own AOL keywords in firefox by setting the `keyword` field in `Manage Bookmarks`. Bookmark hackernews, set the keyword to `hn`, then all you have to do in the address bar is `hn<enter>` and you're here.
well this changes things. Thanks for the tip!
If you replace part of the URL with %s then you can use a keyword? as part of the URL.
The New York Times still has their list of AOL Keywords here!
https://archive.nytimes.com/www.nytimes.com/info/help/aol-ke...
Now it's instagram usernames (and the app stores, as you pointed out).
We gave people the concept of portable identity with domain names, and they rejected it for another walled garden.
Instagram usernames are much easier to reason about if you don't understand/care about the differences between domains, subdomains, tlds, protocols etc.
We gave people a messy solution that assumed they would care about implementation details.
I don’t know if domain names is really that much better a solution—between the messiness of protocols, subdomains, and TLDs (how many kids in school went to whitehouse.com instead of whitehouse.gov back when the former was a porn site?), they can also expire and be replaced with a domain showing very different content. Lidl recently had to recall some kids snacks because the URL was not showing what they wanted it to.
URLs don’t have spell check. I usually just Google most of the time to make sure I’m not getting phished by a site one character off.
Considering the level of computer knowledge and sophistication of most 90s users, this was a genius idea. The fact that it also served as a form of marketing and soft lock-in was also not overlooked
> I've noticed a lot of ads in Japan tell the users to search (presumably Google) for a specific phrase, and buying the adwords for that is more or less the modern equivalent of paying for an AOL keyword.
There was a CBC News article within the last while that linked to an earlier article. However, the hyperlink pointed to a Google query for “blah blah topic cbc article”.
It was interesting to see that journalists within large organizations are hacking together their own resources instead of relying on internal tools (likely because they don’t exist).
I always assumed that ads that told people to search for the product/company were to raise their search ranking (due to relevancy?). But I’ve got no idea if that would actually make a difference or not, or if it is just so people don’t have to type a URL as you said.
The heyday of AOL keywords was before SEO or search engine relevancy was anything that any company cared about. Search engines existed, but this was mostly pre-Google and they were not great. A lot of discovery happened in other ways - the AOL keyword scheme was basically their attempt to tie web discovery to their products so people who left AOL wouldn't know what to do.
Sorry, I should have been clearer. I’m talking about modern ads that you see now. They will often say ‘search for Hilton hotels’ or whatever, rather than the domain. I thought that was to help SEO
It was the latter. AOL users didn’t even know what URLs were.
The article didn’t have a screen shot of how AOL tacked the entire Internet Internet onto their glorified BBS as a button on their toolbar. Seriously.
> AOL keyword <xyz>!
And we've gone full circle. We have the same today, just in a form of a #tag.
AOL keywords were shortcuts to URLs like bit.ly right?
They could be, but often they launched something on-platform in AOL's walled garden that could not be accessed by a web browser. Basically, windows inside of the AOL application. Screenshots would explain better than I can but I'm having trouble finding a good one. Maybe: https://i.insider.com/53f27f8069bedd317d1c5fb5?width=1200
Not all the time. Many keywords were a shortcut into a curated multimedia portal inside AOL. It could be equivalent to a web site for a brand, but could also be a more general area inside AOL with related articles, chat rooms, etc on that topic. More like opening a magazine than running a web search or typing a URL.
Didn't most AOL keywords redirect to AOLs content only hosted on AOL? I don't remember what their "sites" were called, but I used to use keywords to navigate to those areas. I don't really remember using them at all to get to actual websites. I only had AOL for two years before we got a cable modem in late 1998 though, maybe that was more common in the later years when the web started picking up.
> I feel like we still kind of have the "URLs are hard" problem.
QR codes.
Ah, that's true. Even Google search has used this sort of pattern to try and become a "soft walled garden". Things like widgets that look like they might take you to Wikipedia, but land on Google pages instead.
Now it is search for XYZ and/or a picture of a rounded box with XYZ and a magnifying glass. Of course search === Google in this context.
[dead]