Habits the browser taught you · habit 05 of 40

Typing the name in the bar

Nobody types full addresses any more. You type two or three letters, the right thing appears, and you press enter before the third letter has finished registering.

The habit

You type the name of the market into the bar rather than a full address, and take whatever the browser puts in front of you.

Why it is automatic

The bar taught this by being right. For years, typing a rough name into it has produced the intended site at the top, nearly every time. That is not luck. It is history matching, bookmark matching and a search engine that is very good at mapping names of things to the things themselves. A tool right that often stops being checked.

It also became the fastest route to anywhere. Opening a bookmark folder is slower than typing three letters, so even people who keep careful bookmarks reach for the bar. The keystrokes end up in the fingers, the completion arrives before the eye has read it, and enter is pressed on trust.

The failure mode elsewhere is gentle as well. A mistyped name gets you a results page, you glance at it, you click the obvious one, no harm anywhere. That gentleness is what makes the same behaviour easy to repeat here without noticing the conditions changed.

What it actually does here

The first thing to be clear about is where the text goes. Anything the bar cannot parse as a complete address is a query, and a query is sent to whichever provider the browser is set to use, over whatever connection the machine has. The words in it are the words you typed, which in this case name the thing you were looking for.

On many setups it is more than one query. Search suggestions send what has been typed as it is typed, so a name entered letter by letter produces a series of partial queries before enter is touched, and they go even if you change your mind and delete the lot. The feature exists so the dropdown can be useful, and it is useful.

What comes back is ranked, and ranking measures how well a page performs against a search engine. It says nothing about whether an address on that page is the one published by the market. Any page that covers the subject enough can rank. That applies to this site too, which is why the address list is published as a page rather than as a claim.

The bar also keeps what you typed. Typed entries go into history and are offered back later as completions, in front of anyone using that profile, triggered by a single letter. So the query is made, the answer is ordered by a third party, and the phrase itself stays on the machine for as long as the history does.

One box doing two jobs

The decision behind all of this is that the bar guesses intent from what you type. A complete address is a place. Anything else is a question. The rule is simple, documented, and right almost all of the time, because on the ordinary web a half remembered name genuinely is a question.

Where it stops being right is narrow but sharp. An address that is long, random and impossible to remember will always be typed incompletely, so it will always be classified as a question, so a mars market url typed from memory always leaves as words. No setting inside the bar changes that logic.

What the top result means

It is worth stating plainly what a first position is and is not, because the reflex to trust it is strong and mostly earned. It says a page satisfied a ranking system for a set of words. It says nothing about authorship, accuracy or freshness. On the ordinary web those coincide, because the site that owns the name also owns the domain.

A complete address

Requested directly, with no query and no third party involved.

A partial address

Treated as a query, because it does not parse, and sent to the search provider.

A typed name

Sent as a query, plus partial queries first if suggestions are on.

A pasted address

Requested directly if complete, which is why pasting behaves differently from typing.

What to do instead

The fix is mechanical rather than behavioural. Give the bar something it can parse, and stop it asking questions on your behalf while you type.

1. Paste the whole address rather than typing part of it, since a complete string is requested directly and an incomplete one becomes a query.
2. Turn off search suggestions in settings, which stops the keystroke by keystroke queries without changing anything else.
3. Open the address from a saved entry or a written copy rather than from the name, so the bar is never asked to guess.
4. If a name has already been typed, clear the address bar history and not only the page history, since some builds store them separately.
5. Treat a results page as a place to leave rather than to choose from, and go back to a copy you already had.

How to notice you did it anyway

What the bar has learned is visible from the bar itself, which makes this the quickest of these checks to run.

• Type the first letter of the market name into the bar on each profile and read what drops down before deleting it.
• Open the history and filter it for results pages, which record the query in the address itself.
• Check whether search suggestions are enabled, since an update or a new profile can turn them back on.
• Look at the search activity on any account the browser is signed into, since queries can be recorded there too.
• Watch what the bar offers when somebody else uses the machine, since completions appear for whoever is typing.

What readers ask about this habit