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Comment by spanishgum | Hacker News Reader

Even on a desktop / laptop, many people probably use the browser's auto-complete or bookmarks for access.

Talk to people who run usability studies and ask how many users know that the browser can do these things.

People joke about "my grandfather opens his browser and types 'Yahoo' into Bing, clicks the link and types 'Google' in to Yahoo, clicks the link and types 'Facebook' into Google to get to Facebook", but it's not that wild an exaggeration of how much of the developed world -- which is not computer-literate -- uses the web. That's part of why walled gardens and native-feeling app experiences are so successful.

Adoption of Chrome likey erases that pattern. As more and more people adapt to searching from the address bar, autocomplete is also used more and more.

No people type google.com into the address bar and then enter facebook in search page.

You'd be surprised how often people do in fact do exactly that. I know two personally. I don't have overall figures but it's definitely greater than zero.

Isn't there a service which shows popularity of search terms? That would be one way to get a handle on frequency.

Found it:

https://www.google.com/trends/explore?q=Facebook

I don't know this tool well enough to know if this is for queries where the only term is Facebook. Happy to be corrected!

I put a link to Facebook in grandma's bookmarks toolbar, she generally just clicks that to get started.

Isn't the growth at the other end?

What browser ? I just click on the internet.

I just have it permanently open now.

Not sure most people even use bookmarks to be honest. Maybe my non-technical friends are atypical, though.

"Navigational searches" are a thing and they are very optimized by Google. But yes, auto-complete likey handles a lot as well.

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