Browser (un)awareness

The following video clip (found via Techcrunch) shows a Google employee conducting a brief survey with passersby at Time Square. It turns out less than 8% of the people were able to correctly tell what a browser is.

Graphical browsers have of course contributed significantly to the success and growth of the Web and I bet a lot of the participants routinely use a browser. I thought it was particularly interesting that a lot of them did not seem to distinguish between browsers and search engines though.

Search has become the main method of navigating the Web. Users have learned to rely on it. Maybe for some of those interviewees, browsers have mentally mostly disappeared then, as part of creating simplified abstractions of online tasks.