Early Google users didn't search.
Back in the year 2000 this strange problem perplexed Google employees. After all Google was a search engine and users were expected to type in what they were looking for in that search bar to take them to the results page.
As much as the problem was intriguing, the solution was also equally interesting.
This curious case of early Google search comes to notice in Laszlo Bock's new book Work Rules!: Insights from Inside Google That Will Transform How You Live and Lead. Bock is senior vice-president, people operations at Google.
Many of you would be aware that the Google home page was so bare looking (it still is) primarily because the founders did't know HTML and they just wanted to put a quick interface together. But then this simplicity proved to be a little too ahead of its time.
"Our sparce presentation was so unorthodox that one of our earliest challenges was that users would look at the Google Web page and not type anything. We couldn't figure out why until we went out and did a user study at a nearby college, actually watching students try to use Google," writes Bock.
According to Marissa Mayer, now CEO of Yahoo and at that time a Google employee, users were so used to websites that "flashed, revolved and asked you to punch the monkey," that they thought that there had to be more coming.
It then became clear to the Google employees that users were not searching because they were still waiting for the page to finish loading.
Google, found a very simple but effective solution. "We wound up sticking a copyright tag at the bottom of the page, not so much because we needed a copyright on the page, but because it was a way to say 'This is the end,'" Google's engineering vice-president Jen Fitzpatrick is quoted as saying.
"The copyright notice fixed the problem."
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