my mom types every address into the Google search window - no wonder they have 70% of the search market :P - Nathaniel Payne

i hadnt even thought of that part of it! - Marshall Kirkpatrick

I've always said that if I go back to school, my thesis will be on how a persons use of Windows correlates to their personality and psychological make-up. For example, how do people cut and paste? Edit cut, edit paste vs. ctrl-C, ctrl-V vs. right clicks. People putting URL's outside of the address bar is one of those things that is a peeve when I have to watch it, but interesting when you ask people why they do it. Sometimes people don't know (my mom), sometimes it is carry over behavior from AOL, sometimes, as Jay points out, it is to protect from typos, though not often. Sometimes people don't know that they can do a CTRL +Enter to get the .com suffix (or simply can't type). For them, it is easier to start a URL and click away. - Scott Schnaars from FriendFeed MT Plugin

People type into the Google search box because they don't realize that the web is not yet the semantic web, and so they ask that search box to 'find me what I mean' (not some ditzy dub dub dub gleeble dot gurp). They're way ahead of Marshall and all the pundits and nerds (me included) who have become artificially intelligent through too much code wanking :-) - Mark Szpakowski

that's a fascinating theory, Mark. I think you may be on to something. - Marshall Kirkpatrick

Marshall - great post - sometimes it's easy to navel gaze a little to much in this rarefied world of the digerati. While we could wax lyrical about the e-tards who can't even tell the difference between url box and search box - those e-tards make up the majority out there. Really design should be focussed totally on them and not those of us who, at the end of the say, would probably just prefer a command line search prompt - Ben Kepes from FriendFeed MT Plugin

They will never learn. I think the opposite will happen. The address bar will disappear being replaced by the search bar. Why? Because most of the time people search the web even if they know exactly what their target is. The url is and will remain just a way for the browser, and for the search engines to identify content. This kind of usage pattern shows us that the users care only about the real information, they try to strip away useless bits like http, www, or .com and there is nothing wrong with this. - Andrei Savu from FriendFeed MT Plugin

Marshall, I think that if it works for 99 per cent of people then it's not wrong, just different. I think I remember this idea being raised the last time these figures were released and it reminds me of the old (and long since resolved) debate about the command line versus a GUI. Personally, I think many people have better things to do on-line than remember the specific combination of letters a Web-site owner has chosen to use for their site. I think it's exactly that process (having to remember a URL) that held many people back from using the Web more in the early days. I'm glad there's simpler method now. - Paul McKeon from FriendFeed MT Plugin

I've never thought it would be possible for people to mistake their address bar with search bar. Maybe browsers should paint them in diferent colors? - Sasha Kovaliov(.com)

I do that all the time but for some specific reasons: 1) I use opera and every time I use the search bar google gives money to them and I like to support them 1) It's a sanity check to make sure I am not hitting a typo squatter. - Lurking Grue from FriendFeed MT Plugin