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by pasta1212 2692 days ago
> Heck people put google.com into the box and search for it rather then enter a url and hit ctrl-enter.

Not even that. They google directly from the address bar. Once you could google without going to google.com, anecdotally I started to notice most people would google everything, including URLs they obviously knew
2 comments
dwighttk 2692 days ago
Once jerks started domain name spamming this became recommended behavior unless I’m 100% certain of my url.
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kkarakk 2692 days ago
remembering urls is not a trivial task. it's the reason why we have bookmarks and history functions in browsers. a good search engine like google abstracts that away. i couldn't remember the name stack overflow for quite some time(i always associated stack with hay in my mind)

just typing in "hay code questions" would get me to stackoverflow in google. not so in bing/yahoo search(at the time)

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stevenicr 2691 days ago
Indeed there are likely many good reasons for making the url bar become a search bar under certain circumstances (I would bet the money google pays mozilla for these kinds defaults was actually touted as 'make things better for the users' )

and it certainly can make things better in some ways, and likely for a majority of people.

I for one however was appalled the first time I found not typing my url properly sent that data to google to find a suitable alternative.

(also disturbed when I see cell phone carrier give me a "you may be looking this-and-that list of links when a 404 or similar is detected - helpful maybe, doing it for the monetization? probably. Stealing privacy at the same time? Maybe.

Providing a curated version of available resources? Yes. That is often censoring more and more these days. Google does not provide the internet options to end users that it did 7 years ago.

I have seen people go to the url bar type "google" and hit enter - which on many browsers default searches google for google.

Whatever the reasoning for these issues, the result seems to be that most people think they need to use google to get to parts of the internet and don't know any other way.

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