The author's thesis may be true: maybe people make this mistake all the time. But, remember on the Tonight Show, where Jay Leno would go out on the street and

The author's thesis may be true: maybe people make this mistake all the time. But, remember on the Tonight Show, where Jay Leno would go out on the street and ask a lot of people questions, then they'd edit together a segment that made it look like all of the interview subjects were idiots? It's not fair to characterize the entire sample from a curated selection. In this case, Amazon probably gets hundreds of millions of searches a day, and it probably doesn't take many URLs being pasted in the search box to show up as automatic suggestions. One of the examples that pops up is "amzn.to/3tmosfj": how many people do we think searched for that url? A million people? Closer to a hundred people? Or was it one person, one time, out of a billion possible users? I don't know the answer, but that's the point: nobody does. So, we can't draw conclusions from this example about how people use (or misuse) the search bar.