Google Trends or other year-end reports on popular queries don't include navigational queries. For example searching for nytimes to go to nytimes.com. When I worked at a competing web search engine the (real) top 100 was full of navigational queries (and lot of queries that will also never show up in official reports, like 'sex').<p>When I watch family members I think it gets worse every year. Every brand name is typed into the browser URL bar and instead of just adding .com (or .fr or .de depending on country) it goes to Google and they click the first result. Often enough that's an ad and Google earned a few cents by users not typing in .com
Interesting thread raised by Jason Fried last week: <a href="https://twitter.com/jasonfried/status/1168986962704982016" rel="nofollow">https://twitter.com/jasonfried/status/1168986962704982016</a>