Those of us who live and breathe technology often accuse the rest of the planet of being populated by spoonfed idiots who have problems comprehending their DVD player, let alone the way that technology is changing the world around them.

Usually, our reactions are an overstatement - just a matter of a people needing a little more hi-tech literacy, and our anger borne from having to provide computer support to all manner of friends who haven't worked out that they should probably try turning it off and on again.

But sometimes your worst fears are given a real form - when you see the responses what is a browser, for example, or as shown by a little incident when the site ReadWriteWeb wrote about Facebook.... with hilarious consequences.

Yesterday RWW wrote a post about how Facebook was partnering with AOL, in a way that would make the site's login procedure more powerful than ever before - headlining the story "Facebook wants to be your one true login".

Suddenly, thanks to the magic of Google, that post became the most heavily-featured result for searches like "Facebook login" - which caused all kinds of confusion.

It looks like a number of users clicked on the top result, expecting to be taken to Facebook's login page (also known as, erm, facebook.com) and instead being presented with this ENTIRELY DIFFERENT site.

The post now has a comment thread of around 300 posts, many from disgruntled Facebook users who have clicked and can't work out what's happened to the site they know and love.

assorted comments by Facebook users who did not realise they were on a different website

While some of the comments are from jokers, many appear to be genuinely confused users. It's the sort of thing that makes you despair - when can't even work out they're not on the site they think they are, let alone understand that they could always reach Facebook by simply typing the address into the browser.

But, lest we simply laugh at the failure of the great unwashed to get the web, let's take a couple of serious points away from the whole thing.

First, it's a bit of a failure on Google's part. If Facebook users want to log in to the site, and Google's returning something that isn't Facebook's front page, then they're not delivering useful search results. That's not great for Google.

Secondly, perhaps we should refigure our idea of how many people actually use the web in this way. While the confused commenters largely seem to be middle-aged non-web-literate people, that doesn't mean they're stupid - just ill-informed.

As Matt Haughey, who runs community site Metafilter, said: "Laugh all you want about ReadWriteWeb, but two weeks ago I watched a 35 year-old friend with a PhD go to Facebook by googling 'facebook login'."