this post was submitted on 10 Jul 2023
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Mildly Interesting

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Title.

This still makes no sense to me.

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[–] [email protected] 93 points 1 year ago (4 children)

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

[–] [email protected] 18 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

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.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 year ago (1 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 11 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Sometimes I type the full url out in Firefox and it still searches

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago

Yeah it does that when what you typed contains certain characters, such as the space.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Ctrl-enter is your friend! Assuming you’re visiting a .com TLD.

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[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago

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.

[–] [email protected] 42 points 1 year ago

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.

[–] [email protected] 26 points 1 year ago (1 children)

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

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago

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.

[–] [email protected] 19 points 1 year ago

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.....

[–] [email protected] 14 points 1 year ago

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

[–] [email protected] 10 points 1 year ago (1 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 year ago (1 children)

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

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

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

[–] [email protected] 9 points 1 year ago (2 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

Yeah, that's what I suspect is happening here

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

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.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 1 year ago (1 children)

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

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 year ago

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!

[–] [email protected] 8 points 1 year ago

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

[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 year ago

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.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

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.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 year ago (1 children)

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

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago

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.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 year ago (1 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago

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.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 year ago

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.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 year ago (3 children)

Check how many people googles google

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago

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.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

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 🤷

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago

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

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago (1 children)

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

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

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.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago

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.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago (2 children)

Have people never heard of bookmarks?

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago

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.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago
[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago

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.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago

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

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago

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.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago

It works better than the reddit search feature

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago

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.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago

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

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago

Ctrl+Enter!

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago

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.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago

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.

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