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

Title.

This still makes no sense to me.

  • SomeoneElse@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

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

    • Rhynoplaz@lemmy.world
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      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.

    • Hogger85b@kbin.social
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      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.

  • zkfcfbzr@lemmy.world
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    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.

    • Kelsenellenelvial@lemmy.ca
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      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.

  • relevant_ace@lemmy.world
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    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…

  • Greenskye@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

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

  • BillDaCatt@kbin.social
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    1 year ago

    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.

  • buildbreakrepeat@kbin.social
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    1 year ago

    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.

    • Neato@kbin.social
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      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.

  • Saneless@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    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

    • breakfastburrito@sh.itjust.works
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      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!

  • Timwi@kbin.social
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    1 year ago

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

  • amenotef@lemmy.world
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    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.

  • Sabata11792@kbin.social
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    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.

  • lagomorphlecture@lemm.ee
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    1 year ago

    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.

    • theragu40@lemmy.world
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      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.

  • LChitman@kbin.social
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    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.