Google just made the best argument for hiding the URL in your browser’s address bar
Google made a tiny change recently that is probably a big deal for people who need to work on this kind of stuff every day, but one that means little to nothing for everyone else.
Because the internet is worldwide and people in different places are best served with different information, the company used to use what’s called a country code top-level domain redirect when you searched for something. This meant that your search results came from google.ng if you were in Nigeria, for example. This allowed the company to curate its results better to (hopefully) ensure they were more relevant.
Google has been working on ways to improve this since 2017, and it thinks it has reached the point where ccTLD redirects are no longer needed and all searches are in the process of being “un-re-directed” back to plain old google.com.
The company says you might need to re-enter some of your search preferences once this happens for you, but promises that the results will be the same as you’re used to seeing. The difference is what’s going on up in the browser’s address bar.
Yep, this is dry, boring news that most people either don’t care about or just don’t understand. But it does tell me one thing — hiding the full web address in your browser’s bar — something I have hated seeing since it started being a thing — was probably the right call. It seems that the geniuses at tech companies are once again smarter than Jerry is.
Case in point: I, and plenty of other paranoid security-conscious people like me, have long told you that it’s very important to check the URL of any website you’ve visited to make sure it is legit. Seeing google.co.kr (South Korea) or google.co.br (Brazil) would be an immediate red flag to someone who isn’t super tech savvy, but knew why they needed to make sure they were at the right place. You went to Google and searched for something, so you would assume that the results would come from Google, not “Google.something else.”
This is a trap a lot of people writing about tech, as well as people who understand how it works, can fall into. It’s easy to assume that anyone would know why this is happening and that it was OK, and that’s just wrong. Plenty of well-adjusted “normal” people do not care about this kind of thing. They use their phone or laptop because they enjoy it, never caring to go any deeper.
When a company like Apple or Google does something to dumb down the tech experience, they are not thinking about people who write for a tech publication or people who regularly read them. They are thinking about the vast majority of people who have no interest in how the fudge is made.
I’m still going to hate it every time, and you probably will, too. But companies like Google won’t care. Maybe they shouldn’t after all.
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