[w1ntermute]

Out of curiosity, how did the OP even find out that this was going on? He appears to be a long-time user of the site, and therefore would have no reason to Google "Hacker News".

The most common other reason would be that some people use Google as their URL bar - instead of typing "hackerne.ws" or "news.ycombinator.com" into the URL bar, they type "Hacker News" into Google and click on the first result. However, I would've thought that the types of people using HN would have the tech savvy to use a keyword bookmark, or at least the URL.

[pbhjpbhj]

Sometimes I want to find HN but am using a different device, sometimes that device is also a touchscreen and typing is a pain. Usually Google is very close to hand and the autocomplete saves typing out a full address or full set of keywords.

So I'd only need to type "hacke" in google and click "I'm feeling lucky" in the drop down rather than type "http://news.ycombinator.com/ into an address bar.

Didn't know about the hackerne.ws domain name however.

[narcissus]

Could've been from telling a friend "hey yeah... found this on Hacker News". Then the friend went looking for 'Hacker News' on Google and came across the current top result.

At that point that friend asks the OP: "by Hacker News, you mean <this other site>, right?". Then the OP goes looking...

[yonran]

When I'm on someone else's phone or computer, I just search for [hn] to geT here quickly.