I stumbled upon an interesting fact while reading up on a post about how Google is creating a competitor for Facebook. Every month Google records over 2 billion searches for the word Facebook. Here is a screenshot of the AdWords Keyword Tool results.

Screenshot of the search for the word Facebook using the Adwords Keyword tool.

So it stands to reason obviously that a good number of these searches stem from people not knowing the difference between the search bar and the address bar in most of the popular browsers these days. Here is a screenshot in case you don’t actually know! The one on the right is for searches, and you can actually choose your own search engine (you don’t HAVE to use the Googles you know).

There is a difference between these two fields!

One other interesting thing to note…Google has their own browser (you might have heard) called Chrome. In a twist to the usual address and search field set up Google just has one field for both.

Google Chrome, one search to rule them all.

If you enter just the website title in the address bar most modern browsers will take you to the correct site if it is available (filling in the http:// and the .com etc). Google Chrome however will take you to the search results page since you are using their address/search field, thus adding more hits to their results pages…A bit crafty I say.