After hitting Ctrl+L, I usually do one of these: 1) "Enter" to discard current page; 2) "Alt+Enter" to open in new tab; 3) "Ctrl+Enter" to open in new tab but keep focus on current page (e.g. read later); and 4) "Esc" if I got an answer from the address bar (math, currency, history, already open page, etc).

My own experience is that all of the times I press Ctrl+T is to open a new tab to enter a location I want to navigate to; I don't care much for what the new tab displays (this is why I set my default new tab to a blank page), and if I did, it would probably be a distraction.

> What I'm doing instead: in current tab hit Cmd+L to focus on address bar, type query/address hit Option+Enter to open resulted page in a new tab.

Personally I do know the hotkeys and I know that Alt+Enter opens the url in a new tab, but I never use the second one. That's why I was asking.