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<div class="moz-cite-prefix">On 08/16/2013 11:14 AM, Gavin Sharp
wrote:<br>
</div>
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cite="mid:CAHBT5m2T8k7EQ8iLhDA-vTXNA6P6UYKuLzjiti3zXnke81srOA@mail.gmail.com"
type="cite">
<pre wrap="">
No worries, William, I appreciate that you've been willing to discuss
this quite even-handedly. Being an open project, we often have to deal
with much less productive feedback and questioning :)</pre>
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<br>
I can only imagine.<br>
<br>
<blockquote
cite="mid:CAHBT5m2T8k7EQ8iLhDA-vTXNA6P6UYKuLzjiti3zXnke81srOA@mail.gmail.com"
type="cite">
I don't think "no data" is fair. We had the heat map study that I
linked to previously, and telemetry data that indicates the
percentage
of Telemetry users which had a modified keyword.URL preference.
These
are "reliable numbers", hard data, and they informed our
judgement. We
also have some hard data that hasn't been published yet, from FHR,
that suggests the vast majority of searches are performed with the
default search engine (this is in aggregate, not broken down
per-user,
so we do not know e.g. how many users use one search engine in the
search bar and another in the location bar, which as I understand
it
is what you mean by "the feature" in this post and others.).
Obviously, we should do a better job of publishing the data and
our
conclusions derived from it, so you don't have to take my word on
it.
We are working on that.
</blockquote>
<br>
<br>
Ok. Yes, sorry for being imprecise, I meant "no direct data on the
use of this feature". Or, perhaps to be more neutral with respect to
what's a feature, I should say "no direct data on how many users
would perceive this as a breaking change".<br>
<br>
<blockquote
cite="mid:CAHBT5m2T8k7EQ8iLhDA-vTXNA6P6UYKuLzjiti3zXnke81srOA@mail.gmail.com"
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<blockquote type="cite">
<pre wrap="">So from that, it seems fair to say that the number of affected users is
thousands to millions, but tens of millions is out of bounds, yes?
</pre>
</blockquote>
<pre wrap="">
I don't think these back-of-the-envelope made up guesses are
particularly useful or likely to be productive. I doubt very much that
more than thousands of users are negatively impacted (and that's on
the order of 0.002% of our user base, by conservative estimates).</pre>
</blockquote>
<br>
<br>
Ok. That back-of-the-envelope calculation was my way of trying to
reconcile your theory that there are only thousands of users
affected with the fact that within a couple of weeks 760 people have
found and installed this extension. That seems an impossibly large
uptake rate to me given the number of steps involved and typical
user behaviors. How would you reconcile the two facts?<br>
<br>
Also, my theory is that the number of people negatively impacted by
this change is people who:<br>
<ul>
<li>use the url bar to search Google,</li>
<li>have changed the search box to something else, and<br>
</li>
<li>continued to use the url bar for Google.</li>
</ul>
<p><br>
I believe that is going to be much more than 0.002% of your user
base. Do you?<br>
</p>
<br>
<blockquote
cite="mid:CAHBT5m2T8k7EQ8iLhDA-vTXNA6P6UYKuLzjiti3zXnke81srOA@mail.gmail.com"
type="cite">
<pre wrap="">There are several classes of "hijackers". The blatantly malicious ones
will adapt no matter what we do; we can try to make their life harder,
but that's an arms race with no clear end. The other class of
"hijackers" (which may be too pejorative a term) are legitimate
companies with reputations to keep that will not stoop so low as to
try to forcibly prevent user control of searches, but have an
incentive to "nudge" users towards changing their search engine -
sometimes too aggressively for our taste. And sometimes these
non-malicious actors just run up against limitations of our code - for
example, prior to these changes the easiest way to change location bar
searches (set the keyword.URL pref) also ended up being the least
user-friendly, and so the "lazy" way to do this ended up being
harmful. Eliminating the lazy, user-harmful way of doing this forces
these actors to put in a bit more effort, which ensures a better user
experience.
</pre>
</blockquote>
<br>
Ok. I see what you're saying here. Thanks for explaining.<br>
<br>
William<br>
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