[loup-vaillant]

> For the average person, it's safer and faster just to let Google figure it out.

Of course. Only a genius like me can use the address bar's auto completion. I know: even my programmers colleagues at work reach for the search bar, I must be a unique snowflake.

Seriously though, the difference isn't that big, barely a speed bump. But that speed bump is enough to cause people to go around it, and use Google even when reaching for something as simple as news.ycombinator.com!

I think it's less a matter of capability, and more a misunderstanding of the costs. Giving your search terms away doesn't seem like such a bad deal, considering the search engine is free to use. We just tend to forget that we pay with our data, and that data is valuable because it will later be used to sell us things we would otherwise not have bought.

But such a cost is so indirect and so removed from its actual cause that we tend to just ignore it. I know I often do.

[acdha]

I agree that there's a downside to having search as a fallback to locations but try to be a bit more empathetic for the people who might type something like “support.apple.com” as “supportapple.com” and end up somewhere sketchy.

If they've previously hit the site before, autocompletion will work but lots of people hear about sites in contexts which don't give them a direct clickable link on the computer they want to use and they're a lot more likely to have a negative outcome from that than Google's data mining.