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Comment by kijin | Hacker News Reader

I don't do this with well-known sites like Google and Twitter, but sometimes I deliberately search a website's name even when I think I know what its URL is. This helps me avoid landing on a similar but unrelated -- and possibly fraudulent -- website, especially if the website I'm looking for uses an unconventional domain name. Too often, it's impossible to remember whether the startup I just heard about uses .com, .net, .io, getname.com or nameapp.com.

Fortunately, with modern browsers, the difference is only between typing "websitename" in the address bar and typing "websitename.TLD" in the same bar. So if I'm not 100% sure what your TLD is, I just hit Enter and the browser shows me the search results.

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Yeah, I've made a habit of this too -- what is the _advantage_ for me in typing in, say, python.org when there's a risk I might be misremembering it as python.com?

I believe there's also a slight security advantage, in that search engines will index and respect redirects to HTTPS (even without HSTS), and if I click through the search engine link, I stay on SSL for the entire transaction since the search query itself is HTTPS. This protects me against a man-in-the-middle when possible, and also saves me the annoyance of getting an SSL error when not. (I am also training myself to type https:// instead of http://, but the search-engine route is way more usable.)

I do the same for my bank and some e-commerce websites.

However, I never do that for websites I read daily. Either I know the URL or the browser remembers it for me.

Apart for exceptions (deliberately trying to find the good url or finding a specific website), searching is illogical.

That would be exactly like asking your GPS the way from work to home every single day.

I also find navigating through Google helpful when a company has multiple TLDs for different countries, or different companies in different TLDs own the same name. Google is great at knowing what I want.

A variation on this one is when I know which site I want to go to and which specific page: "amazon method dish soap refill." Google search is typically faster than going to the site and then using their internal search.

Why not just use bookmarks? Hitting one takes even less time than searching for the URL...

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