Looks like this was interesting enough for the New York Times Magazine to take your idea and report on it as their own: http://www.nytimes.com/2010/02/14/magazine/14fob-medium-t.ht...

Still surprises me just how many people put website names into google instead of just putting the address into their browser. It's like AOL keywords or something :/

I do it all the time. It's a lot more convenient than fiddling with domain names, top-level domains, typing errors, etc. (ctrl-k)hacker news(enter) is a lot easier to type than (ctrl-l)news.y(enter) in my opinion given that the latter requires me to press shift and > (thats a . on a UK keyboard) the same time which is a bit of a hassle.

(ctrl-t)n(enter) here. I'll admit that it is rare to type in a full website address nowadays. And using Chrome, Google knows everything I type in anyway....

unfortunately, (ctrl-t)n yields news.bbc.co.uk for me.

In Chrome, would "imdb <my movie>" or "amazon <my book>" show up as googling a website name? That could explain some of it.

The most common search in Google is 'Google' apparently...

Probably some of that is people like me who accidentally hit enter instead of ctrl-enter after typing google, causing it to go to google and search for the word google.

What is ctrl-enter for?

It puts http://www.<what you typed>.com and then navigates to that location. Works in IE, Firefox, and Safari (haven't checked other browsers.

Go to the address bar and type "google" - then hit ctrl-enter. Ctrl-shift-enter is .org, and alt-shift-enter is .net.

Oh thanks, I was trying ctrl-enter in the search bar, not the address bar.

People google for Yahoo. Now thats just dumb.

Since Yahoo is (also) a portal, not nearly as dumb as the other way around!