Earlier quoted context omitted.
> People are now too dumb to type addresses? This is unwarranted condescension. Many URLs are long and non-obvious — do remember that people usually want specific pages rather than a top-level homepage — and there's a thriving industry registering domains which are one typo away from something legitimate and loading them up with ads & malware. For the average person, it's safer and faster just to let Google figure it…
> For the average person, it's safer and faster just to let Google figure it out. Of course. Only a genius like me can use the address bar's auto completion. I know: even my programmers colleagues at work reach for the search bar, I must be a unique snowflake. Seriously though, the difference isn't that big, barely a speed bump. But that speed bump is enough to cause people to go around it, and use Google even when r…
If they've previously hit the site before, autocompletion will work but lots of people hear about sites in contexts which don't give them a direct clickable link on the computer they want to use and they're a lot more likely to have a negative outcome from that than Google's data mining.