Marshall Kirkpatrick comments on a recent Hitwise study, remarking that a whole load of people *still* type in the URL not in the Address Bar, but directly into a search engine, to find their site.  Marshall’s wondering if civilization as we know it would collapse around our ears if some elements of the web going community were to grow a few IQ points (that’s how I parsed it, anyway).

Personally, I think it confirms what I’ve always believed — that there is a wide, WIIIIDE gulf between “average” users of the web (and I grossly assume people using dating sites, as the example used by Marshall, are average) and the above average power user / keen early adopters devourers (read: geekasaurus maximus and proud of it) of new media. 

I’m sure that the split occurs along some generational lines, some attitudinal lines, and other psycho-social demographics — I’m not going to rant about what they *are*, because I’m not sure they’re as important as recognizing that the split will likely always exist in some form or another.

Why is that?  You might think that given the graphical web as we know it is probably more than 10 years old (probably pushing 15), there’s been a lot of time for people to get used to certain conventions.  And I’d certainly think — if you were being a little age-ist — that it even applies to people of a younger age, as, on the whole, its probably less likely that the geriatric amongst us are frequenting such dating sites (and thus making the “mistake” of “searching” for the URL of a site).

Yes, I think that the biggest piece of evidence the gulf exists — and will likely always exist — is in web advertising, particularly the direct-advertising variety, namely, and specifically, Google Adwords.

Google’s life blood, I think, is built upon the naivite of thousands of thousands of people clicking on ads that they don’t realize are *not* really ads.  I think if this deception were somehow magically lifted, there would be a whole lot FEWER people clicking on those benignly blue underlined links (even though its clearly noted as “sponsored” or ‘advertisements’), and quite a bit fewer people wandering into giant spam blog networks and other (but not necessarily) spammy and / or overly commercial and unhelpful areas of the web.

So would the whole world collapse on itself if mainstream users ever learn to the address bar?  Not quite — but as a surrogate for the behaviour of a dramatically large percentage of web users world wide, it might, for example, mean the end of <gasp> direct advertising on the web … and perhaps, therefore, Google itself.