When I was at Britannica in the late 90s our #1 search term was "yahoo.com" and #2 was "sex".

I doubt most people navigate that way. Sure, plenty of browsers will do a google search from the address bar but only if what you've typed doesn't resolve on its own.

You'd be surprised how far normal users will go out of their way to avoid the address box, often using comically complex routines.

Google is much more trustworthy than DNS -- it's essentially content-addressed.

Reminds me of the time I searched for 'Google' using my browser's Google search, and then clicked on the first result to get to Google to search for what I was looking for...

Visits on our site over the last month were 14% direct, 5.7% searching for our name, according to GA.

If you are unsure of the domain name, Google is definitely the more trustworthy option.

I do that all the time! Any site whose domain name I can't remember totally, or rather, any site I'm visiting by putting in the domain name, I use google.

That way, I get an extra layer of protection of scams and what-nots. Well worth the extra click or two.

The same "normal" users that are using dropbox in mass? Doubt it.

here's a related story that i am reminded of: i had a customer complain that a survey form on their site was occasionally not working, according to their customers, which they learned by those customers filling out a feedback form on the company's site which then sent them an e-mail. this survey form was a special url that was printed on receipts they gave to customers.

after looking in the server logs and finding nothing strange that would explain why the survey is only occasionally not working (i still didn't have a concrete definition of what "not working" meant), i had the company talk to one of their customers to get more information. he forwarded me the feedback email generated from their website, which included the end user's ip, which i then looked in the logs for.

what i found was that the way the user got to the company's feedback page was by typing "www.theirdomain.com" into yahoo search, clicking on the first result, and then going to the feedback link from their site (the referrer of their initial visit was a search.yahoo.com query for the domain). only after typing "www.theirdomain.com/survey" into yahoo's search box, did i discover the root of the problem.

for whatever reason, yahoo wasn't returning any results for the specific "www.theirdomain.com/survey" query, despite the page being there for years and having proof of yahoo crawling the url many times in the logs. google would bring it up as the first result, as did every other search engine, but for some reason yahoo would just return a "couldn't find anything matching that" error, which the end user translated into "your company's survey page doesn't work". after telling the specific user to type the survey url into the box "at the top of the screen", it of course worked. every other customer complaining about the problem was doing the same thing, all because of yahoo.

Yea you'd be surprised. When I look at Mugasha's organic traffic. The number keyword for search is Mugasha or mugasha.com.

If you thought it's easy to get to Google, think again. In our current round of usability research, only 76% of users who expressed a desire to run a Google search were successful. http://www.useit.com/alertbox/designer-user-differences.html

I frequently see users type www.microsoft.com or similar into Google. I think people see Google as their address bar, as generally it's set as the home page.

Asking a user what the address in the address box/bar is often ends with a blank expression on their face!

I've been using the Web for 14 years and I do it from time to time too! Once you're in the search box anyway, it's more hassle to correct yourself than just search for the domain you wanted :)