In college late 90s I knew one person who would navigate to Yahoo and search for Google.

Those graphs are scaled so the largest result is always at 100 - so you can’t really tell how many people are doing this sort of thing from this graph. It could be dozens or millions. Having your search country set to only South Africa also seems pretty non-representative.

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Blame chrome. Autofill doesn’t include .com? Welp, guess I’ll just hit the top search link instead then.

Could also be due to the fact that the search bar and the address bar is the same, if you forget, or don’t know to put.com at the end, it will take you straight to the search page.

Considering how many web addresses with similar spellings lead to malware sites, it’s usually safer to do a search rather than typing a long address from memory.

I do this when I don’t remember if it’s .com .net or whatever