That certainly looks like a trend!
The post on ReadWriteWeb gives us a bit a background on just how popular searches
of this sort apparently are. In that post Josh Catone asks:
has searching really become so natural that it is more effective to tell people to search for your site than it is to tell them to visit directly?
And his answer is very clear:
the answer appears to be a somewhat surprising "yes."
Of the 10 fastest rising search terms on Google last year, 7 were for searches
where adding a ".com" would have brought the user to the correct site.
These are called "navigational" searches -- searches done when the
user already knows exactly where he or she wants to end up -- and they make
up a surprising large number of total searches.
Catone notes that these "navigational searches" make up 17% of all internet
searches, a percentage that not only suggests that this sort of "searching"
is a trend, but also, to my dismay, a vast number of internet users aren't very
adventurous when it comes to seeking out interesting materials on the web.
Go to: Search Rules!