UPDATED: In Defense Of The Search Bar

The internet elite like to point out that a large swath of the non-elite population finds everything from their browser search bar, rather than the address bar. "Those morons go to Yahoo by searching for Yahoo in the Google search bar, rather than going to Yahoo.com," they say.

Ur-blogger Robert Scoble recently pointed this out in a post about "passionates" vs. "non-passionates", which apparently is some attempt to re-frame the adopter vs. early adopter (false) dichotomy. ReadWriteWeb also touched on the same thing recently wondering: "Will Mainstream Users Ever Learn About The Browser's Address Bar?"

Well let me defend the search bar for a moment. And let me point out that I'm pretty well seasoned and net-savvy. I live and work on the internet full time, as you know. Even for someone like me, there are good reasons to go to sites via search, rather than the address bar.

1. I tend to type very fast and make mis-spellings. When I search, Google recognizes that I mis-styped technorati as tehcnorati and gets me to the correct site either way.
2. When I use the search bar, I don't need to add the .com part. Basically I just need part of the URL to get to the site I want, rather than the one I'm trying to find. That saves me at least 4 keystrokes right there.
3. Ok,  you say... but the URL has auto fill. True, but let's go to the technorati example. If I start typing the first few letters, then I get something like the image below. A long list of similarly titled URL that I have to hunt through to find the right one.

It really doesn't end up getting any more convenient.

Anyway, as much as web elites would like to imagine otherwise, there are perfectly good reasons to just punch the name of the site you're looking for right into the search bar in your browser, rather than the actual address bar. If your internet connection is sufficiently fast, such that the Google results come up right away, it can be more, if not just as convenient.

And rather than see everyone else (and that includes me) as being ignorant rubes, perhaps they should consider why it is that the rest of the world chooses to go to sites in this manner.

Update: Go check out what Tim Lee offers on this subject. It's actually far more insightful and articulate than what I have here.

Comments

[Damien]

Skip the search bar, just use firefox 3 and type your search into the address bar. If google finds an obvious first choice they'll automatically redirect you to the site.

There is one thing to consider in all of this: why should pretentious net "elites" be considered anything but the geek equivalent of the stiff upper lip crowd? Why does it matter what they think?

[Ewan]

Your right the address bar is definitely worse in some situations than typing in the search box.

It's one of the obvious things that cuil.com missed when they designed their search engine - when you put a domain name in it's often not the first result on the page. No matter how good the rest of their results were, that alone would make it difficult to use as my primary search engine.

[Kiwi]

I generally use the dreaded search bar because I can't be bothered remembering the exact URL for the site I want. I bookmark sites I visit often. But the for the rest is easier to use a Google search to find them.

[Owen Byrne]

"Internet elite" made me laugh. The notion that somebody could consider themselves elite because of their mad skills with a browser would be sad, if it wasn't true.

[Bill DAlessandro]

A quick tip that may decrease your reliance on the search bar and save a few keystrokes:

IE and Firefox both have a handy function that will add the http://www. and .com to your entry - just press Ctrl-Enter.

For example, type "yahoo" into your address bar and press Ctrl-Enter: you go directly to http://www.yahoo.com