larry borsato

I was just thinking this myself today:

When there’s a simple box to fill in with your search term, and you know exactly what you’re looking, why bother to use the address bar? If statistics on popular searches are anything to go by, it looks like many people aren’t bothering with that inconvenient “www” and “.com” and are just going straight through Google.

When my wife asks me for the web address of a particular company and I tell her she often mistakenly types it into Google, rather than the address bar, which usually frustrates me.

But maybe she has it right and I have it wrong. For example, I no longer bother to guess the URL of a company when I don’t know it. I just search for the company in Google, and their website is usually the first result. And today I caught myself telling someone to just Google a product because I couldn’t remember the name of the company.

Maybe with Google we don’t need URLs at all anymore. Why bother with something cryptic that I have to guess at when I can just ask by name?