I am going to go against Hanlon's razor here, but doesn't the slow push away from URLs benefit Google? A few years later, instead of type news.ycombinator.com,

I am going to go against Hanlon's razor here, but doesn't the slow push away from URLs benefit Google? A few years later, instead of type news.ycombinator.com, you would need to search for "hacker news", scroll through the ads and then click on the link. So it could be a slow transition to inserting a sort of interstitial ads inter your browsing.