Most importantly, searching through Google generally gets me to my intended destination faster than loading some site and doing a search. Like you say, the URL

Most importantly, searching through Google generally gets me to my intended destination faster than loading some site and doing a search. Like you say, the URL bar in any browser I use also defaults to searching in the default search engine, so if it's Google, it's faster just to type it in there. So, from a new tab, I can just type in "wiki handball" to find the wikipedia page for handball and click to get what I want faster, instead of going to wikipedia.org, waiting for that page to load and then searching for handball and clicking. DDG has the bang searches though, so typing in !wiki handball is faster still.