What is a Browser?

Via Rogier Bikker I saw this quite interesting clip, where a Scott, apparently a Google employee asks people on the streets of New York what they think a browser is. Most of them (92%) don’t seem to know. What I find most revealing though, is that so many of them think of it as a “search engine”. If you read this blog, you will probably realize that a browser is not, strictly speaking, a search engine.

But, is that really true? I am doubtful. I think the term “search engine” is actually very applicable. Of course, we know the browser is the piece of software that gets used to view the content (or access the web applications) housed online. But what we know it to be is irrelevant. It is what people actually perceive it to be that is much more important.

See, to apparently a majority of people, that thing they use to browse the net is simply a tool to help them find content. A search engine, packaged as software, that displays the results of searches, either entered into the address bar as URL’s, or in separate search engines such as Google or Yahoo!.

The fact that Google’s browser, Chrome has an address bar that doubles as a search input field is also very interesting: it is a radical departure and it makes sense not only from a usability point of view, but also from the mental model point of view that people have of a browser.

I guess what is most important to remember from that clip is that people actually perceive things in a (sometimes radical) different way than it was actually intended. Perhaps we should also design products that fit better into what people actually perceive it to be, rather that what we want people to perceive it to be.

EDIT: Turns out, the people in Rotterdam have the same idea’s when it comes to what they think a browser is. A bunch of students from my own University back in The Netherlands performed the same survey. Results were the just about the same. Video in Dutch: