Completely unsurprising
In an office full of people who seem to spend more time on IT training courses than they do working, we set up IE on every computer with handy link buttons to all our intranet sites across the top of the browser window.
A recent redesign of the intranet home page had left out some links to important apps so this was a quick workaround until normality was restored. In the meantime, applications could be accessed as follows:
1) Click appropriate button
The preferred method seemed to be:
1) Start typing 'google' into the address bar.
2) Click the first search suggestion.
3) On the Google results page that appears, click the first link.
4) Realise that they're on a news page about Google, not Google itself.
5) Click Back button (for less savvy users, an alternative was to avoid the complicated Back button and start again from Step 1).
6) Click next link, which *does* link to the Google home page.
7) Type <name of intranet application> into Google search box.
8) Click first result that appears - some random page that has nothing whatsoever to do with our in-house built intranet apps.
9) Stare blankly at the screen for several minutes trying to figure out where the login box is.
10) If the random page happens to have a login option somewhere, attempt to log in using their intranet username/password.
11) Give up, phone support complaining about how terrible the new layout of the intranet app is, and how it isn't accepting their password.
There's a certain breed of otherwise intelligent people who, when faced with the daunting sight of a web browser, mentally descend several rungs down the evolutionary ladder.