Sometimes chrome doesn’t autocomplete the url I’ve started typing to it takes me to search results, not the website.

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.

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

It's actually a tip I was taught so as to avoid accidentally entering a scam or phishing site instead. Of course, then there's the Google Ads being the 'result' and those are the new phishing sites.....

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

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.

A bunch of people append "site:reddit.com" or just "reddit" to searches to avoid SEO bullshit, which might cause false positives in the trends graph.

Android keyboards are still so terrible that I often type "site com" because I hit the space instead of period

Though as a site analyst for many years, this is accurate. Our domain was the top incoming search phrase for a long time. Varied by browser, like IE since it had a separate search bar. Chrome just took them right to our site

This data doesn't show how many people click on the 2nd, 3rd etc. results instead of the first.

I do use Reddit (maybe in the future will start using Lemmy) as a suffix for my searches. But not sure if it counts as one of these searches.

I do this. It's 100% beacuse I am lazy and didn't want to spend a large amount of energy hitting the second key.

And then they click the top link for the ad too.

I do it all the time because the address bar and the search bar are the same bar, on mobile at least. Try it. You open a new tab and get a page with a prompt to type the search term or web address. If you type in the full url with no typos you will be redirected to the correct website. If you do not type the full url you're getting search results. I do not do this intentionally, I'm just lazy and dumb and it gives you that drop down that looks like it's saying "oh look here is a link to like Walmart or whatever" so you click on it but it's search results. This was a very intentional design choice on Google's part.

At my work, they had to put a link to Google on the intranet because people didn't know how to get there if it wasn't their homepage.

Check how many people googles google

Have people never heard of bookmarks?

I do, it's often more efficient for me, I do have my SearXNG set as systemwide shortcut.

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

I'm definitely one of these. I come from the era when misspelling a major websites name meant you landed on a virus infested page that could do all sorts of fun things to your computer.

It's often a typo on the chrome keyboard. Like, I typed in Google.com and it searched for it instead of going there and I don't know why the fuck the damn thing isn't doing what I want

The data in that graph doesn't show what your title is inferring. For one, the y-axis is relative, and not absolute. Secondly, your data range is set to the past week so this says nothing about how this method of searching is trending over any useful period of time.

For the pop up sites on Facebook that try to sell me stuff, I’ll investigate them before going over to their actual website. Sometimes “legit?” or “scam” will auto populate. Sometimes it doesn’t.

I use some sort of browse by name function. I never complete a url, I just type the name and hit enter. It bypasses the search results page and goes to the site direct. So I'm pretty sure I'm contributing to the data but I'm definitely not using it like most.

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.

Ctrl+Enter!

I’m guilty of this. If the .com doesn’t auto fill it’s just as fast to get there from google. Especially if I’m trying to get to a homepage/landing page instead of my bookmarked page

My father did this. I started trying to explain things to him but stopped after about 10s. It wasn't worth it. I could teach him other stuff.

It works better than the reddit search feature

You know nothing, Jon Snow