Interesting example today of the way people use the web. Last week I set up a web site for my mother-in-law’s shop. It’s just a page, it’s quite accessible, although – naturally – it’s not in Google yet. However, my mother-in-law has been insistent she can’t see it, although she says her sister can! She asked a couple of customers to have a look (and she swears she gave them the right URL) and they said they couldn’t get it either.

Any clues as to why this might have been? It’s been long enough for the URL to disseminate around the web.

Here’s the answer, which I’ve only just discovered. Four people, with different backgrounds, and on different machines …and three of them were just typing the URL into Google, just as they presumably always do with directly-typed URLs.

I’ll add that to my “fascinating ways in which normal people use the internet” file, which already contains the time when I watched my fairly web-savvy teenage niece type a few letters of a search term into the Google toolbar search box, wait for the drop-down box of suggested search terms to appear, and when her full search term didn’t appear in that drop down, announce “it’s not on Google”.

PS: Oddly, it’s appeared in Google this morning!