How is this meaningful at all? Of course people knew how to do stuff in Windows 7 because it had, except for some minor and cosmetic changes, basically the same UI as Windows 95. Now with Windows 8 the actually re-designed stuff completely. Is that bad? Well, I myself had to Google a few basic things in the beginning as well, but once you know these basics everything else is rather straight forward.<p>PS: I'm not a full-time windows user. I use OS X and Linux mostly.
All this article tells us is that Windows 8 is <i>different</i> from the previous versions of Windows that most users are familiar with. Windows 8 might suck [1], but the article doesn't in any way demonstrate that.<p>[1] FWIW I use Win 8 every day and had no problem adapting to it. I've been using and developing on Windows since NT 3.51.
It's not really a surprise, Windows 8 is poorly designed to begin with for a desktop experience. This is not anecdotal - the OS sales have been poor, the executive at Microsoft who spearheaded the design was fired, and so on.<p>What's more surprising is how slowly (and I would say, stubbornly) Microsoft is moving to correct it. It's like they don't want to admit that Desktop and Mobile should have distinct UIs since they are used in distinct ways.<p>Your market decides what it wants, something Microsoft adhered to for years. Now it seems Microsoft has it in their heads that the market will adjust to them, even though the data is (thus far) proving the exact opposite.<p>Actually, that's not just some recent thing. That's the oldest business axiom in existence. "Find what people want, and sell it to them", not "Invent something that people may or may not want and wait for them to buy it".
Google's autocomplete feature uses your web history as part of it's algorithm for finding results, so perhaps Google just thinks you're an idiot. When I search for "windows 7 how do I " I get things like "windows 7 how do I make myself an administrator" and "windows 7 how do I create a restore point".<p>It seems possible (likely?) that Google are using your environment data too - an browser on OSX is likely looking for more basic information than a browser on Windows.<p>Regardless, this is a pretty rubbish test.
I wrote an article on how to analyse your Google logs for Question queries. Worth a look in the same vein.<p><a href="http://www.webdistortion.com/2010/07/24/segmenting-question-queries-for-fun-and-profit/" rel="nofollow">http://www.webdistortion.com/2010/07/24/segmenting-question-...</a>
But this isn't representative of problems people had with Windows 7 when it launched, it's problems people are having with it now.<p>I'd be interested to see what Windows 8's search terms look like in another 30 months, when it's the same age Windows 7 is now.
I've tried this with a couple of other sites that are well known but certainly less so than facebook and twitter. Poor results if any. I'm not sure how practical this is for anyone that's not an absolute giant.
I'm lookin' at <i>you</i>, Vista-fied version of Office!<p>(Googling too many things that should be simple in the twisted version of Office that came out with the horrible ribbon thing)