People really do use Google Search to visit well-known websites instead of typing their names into the address bar

Sometimes chrome doesn’t autocomplete the url I’ve started typing to it takes me to search results, not the website.

93

Yup, this is me. Its faster to type "fa", press enter, and click the Google link to Facebook than type everything.com.

Google would rather it look like THEY took you there, so most actions are going to give results instead of the actual site.

18
This happens on firefox with me. It doesn't autocomplete, then I have to tab a couple of search suggestions to get to the website I want.

6
- Sometimes I type the full url out in Firefox and it still searches
  
  11
Ctrl-enter is your friend! Assuming you’re visiting a .com TLD.

4
- bookmark keywords are your friend regardless of TLD
  
  1
Yeah my android phone the URL and search box is combined so somtimes it think I am searching other times it goes straight to to site.

3

Those graphs are scaled so the largest result is always at 100 - so you can't really tell how many people are doing this sort of thing from this graph. It could be dozens or millions. Having your search country set to only South Africa also seems pretty non-representative.

42

I do this when I don't remember if it's .com .net or whatever

26

Same, also if there’s any question if the URL might be something different than the company name, like containing a short form of a word, initialized, or a localization.

Though I think that’s different than what the posted graph states. I might sometimes get mixed up looking for a local company and not knowing if it’s .com or .ca. I’m pretty confident in getting the right URL for common sites like Facebook and Lemmy.

3

It's actually a tip I was taught so as to avoid accidentally entering a scam or phishing site instead. Of course, then there's the Google Ads being the 'result' and those are the new phishing sites.....

19

Permanently Deleted

15

And triple click to open a browser.

3

Blame chrome. Autofill doesn't include .com? Welp, guess I'll just hit the top search link instead then.

14

Considering how many web addresses with similar spellings lead to malware sites, it's usually safer to do a search rather than typing a long address from memory.

10

Especially if you don't remember if it's a .com, .net or .org

7
- I’d using reddit.tk for the longest time before i realised that i was supposed to be on reddit.xxx
  
  1

A bunch of people append "site:reddit.com" or just "reddit" to searches to avoid SEO bullshit, which might cause false positives in the trends graph.

9

Yeah, that's what I suspect is happening here

1
It's this. I'll do search terms and append "reddit" or "youtube" if the current list doesn't get me what I need. I'll do "site:" if it's really fucking stubborn.

1

This data doesn't show how many people click on the 2nd, 3rd etc. results instead of the first.

8

Android keyboards are still so terrible that I often type "site com" because I hit the space instead of period

Though as a site analyst for many years, this is accurate. Our domain was the top incoming search phrase for a long time. Varied by browser, like IE since it had a separate search bar. Chrome just took them right to our site

8

I have the opposite problem on iOS. Every time I try to search for something it.comes.out.like.this and then takes me to a website that doesn’t exist. So frustrating!

5

I do this. It's 100% beacuse I am lazy and didn't want to spend a large amount of energy hitting the second key.

7

And then they click the top link for the ad too.

7

Isn’t the company who posted the ad charged every time their ad is clicked? Sometimes I click them just to make the company pay for me clicking the ad. Lol yes I can be petty.

4

I do use Reddit (maybe in the future will start using Lemmy) as a suffix for my searches. But not sure if it counts as one of these searches.

7

I do it all the time because the address bar and the search bar are the same bar, on mobile at least. Try it. You open a new tab and get a page with a prompt to type the search term or web address. If you type in the full url with no typos you will be redirected to the correct website. If you do not type the full url you're getting search results. I do not do this intentionally, I'm just lazy and dumb and it gives you that drop down that looks like it's saying "oh look here is a link to like Walmart or whatever" so you click on it but it's search results. This was a very intentional design choice on Google's part.

6

Came to say this also. I don't know why this isn't obvious.

I was anti using google instead of URLs for a long time. But once browser makers decided to start catering to people who do that by combining the address and search bar...well it happens by accident so often that I'm now one of those people.

3

Check how many people googles google

5

I do that when internet is kinda funky and I want to check Google, because that's my go to site to see if shit still works. Whatever happens I kinda trust Google the most to be up. So I just search for google in my phone browser which defaults to google.

3
Wallace! Amazon.ca, what's the website for that?

1
I do that when I want to get to Google lens, it's the easiest way since lens.google.com takes you to a bullshit marketing page 🤷

1

At my work, they had to put a link to Google on the intranet because people didn't know how to get there if it wasn't their homepage.

5

I'm definitely one of these. I come from the era when misspelling a major websites name meant you landed on a virus infested page that could do all sorts of fun things to your computer.

4

I do, it's often more efficient for me, I do have my SearXNG set as systemwide shortcut.

4

Have people never heard of bookmarks?

4

Because I don't clutter my neatly organised folders for things I use once in a while. And if auto complete doesn't finish, googling and selecting the first non ad site is a safe bet when u don't know the full address.

2
Whats?

1

In college late 90s I knew one person who would navigate to Yahoo and search for Google.

4

You just unlocked a memory for me!

In the early 2000s I knew someone at my university who would type "google image search" into Google.

1

The data in that graph doesn't show what your title is inferring. For one, the y-axis is relative, and not absolute. Secondly, your data range is set to the past week so this says nothing about how this method of searching is trending over any useful period of time.

3

It's often a typo on the chrome keyboard. Like, I typed in Google.com and it searched for it instead of going there and I don't know why the fuck the damn thing isn't doing what I want

3

For the pop up sites on Facebook that try to sell me stuff, I’ll investigate them before going over to their actual website. Sometimes “legit?” or “scam” will auto populate. Sometimes it doesn’t.

2

I use some sort of browse by name function. I never complete a url, I just type the name and hit enter. It bypasses the search results page and goes to the site direct. So I'm pretty sure I'm contributing to the data but I'm definitely not using it like most.

2

It works better than the reddit search feature

2

My father did this. I started trying to explain things to him but stopped after about 10s. It wasn't worth it. I could teach him other stuff.

2

I’m guilty of this. If the .com doesn’t auto fill it’s just as fast to get there from google. Especially if I’m trying to get to a homepage/landing page instead of my bookmarked page

2

Ctrl+Enter!

2

Could also be due to the fact that the search bar and the address bar is the same, if you forget, or don’t know to put.com at the end, it will take you straight to the search page.

2

You know nothing, Jon Snow

1

Yup, people are that fucking stupid.

0