But if it's not an experiment, I'd start putting my energy into moving away from Google. In the AltaVista era, just before Google, there was a company called Real Names, which wanted to bypass intentional DNS and use searches as direct keywords to domains. Since many people use Google to go to everyday sites, just taking the top result each time, this is in effect what Google would be doing with this change, since one would have to actually go to the site to verify it. Which would be great for ad impressions, but terrible for the consumer experience, IMO way too random for Google to seriously consider it. The next step would be to remove URLs from browsers. But that would be quite a change in direction from good intentions.