I’ve come to know your desire for simple and elegant interfaces, as well as good business cases. Google’s Omnibox uses just the one user entry field to provide not just context but also capture all those revenues lost to entries made in the address bar. Capturing just those lost revenues may pay for the Chrome development, regardless of future profits from application integration.

No, because Mozilla just doesn’t have the assets I mentioned above in the backend to automatically arrive at meaningful and contextual “suggestions” Google/Omnibox can provide. Omnibox is not just about the UI, it’s about what’s behind.

Now, FF can in fact hook into the Google empire but that’s a business decision Google has to make to allow it.

Omnibox is a single entry point that combines search and navigation. Surely, various aspects of that proposition have been present in different capacities in a number of browsers.

What Google can bring to the table uniquely is that seamless blending of search and navigation offered as “suggestions.” These suggestions can be the analytic end-result of local and cloud context, preferences, search and navigation history mapped against PageRank. That combination is hard to do and is not something Opera, Firefox, Safari, etc can provide.

That is the promise of Omnibox. As I outlined at the end of the article above, there are countervailing considerations. But at the end of the day it’s Google ability to focus on it and pull it off, or not.

I get live/google(depends on your default search engine) search results if I put in “some text” in IE address bar and press go. Same is with firefox and opera. AFAIK this feature is not new. However “google suggests” doesn’t work. But these browsers provide features like suggesting browser history/bookmarks etc. from the address bar.
Agree with Thilo in this. Seems marketing makes a real difference!

A question I have is if the algorithms to determine what ads to serve on a page are substantially different for Google than to determine what suggestions to make in Omnibox. It looks to me like Omnibox could access more contextual datapoints to be more precise and more aligned with the intentions of the user, thus being more valuable.

As to your questions:

1. Of course it won’t. Google has complete control over the Omnibox and won’t hurt it’s own interest.

2. Today, with sponsored keywords advertisers have to compete against Google’s own results as well. When you have a straightforward question I think you are not so likely to click a sponsored link anyway. When you have a more open or complicated search you might prefer to view the results in a larger webpage instead of the small Omnibox, so it is not such a strange option to click “search for…” in the Omnibox.

3. Google no doubt will experiment and see what is working and what is not.

4. Advertiser probably are quite opportunistic. They try it out, measure the results and when those results are positive trust will follow.

5. That’s a contradiction. When advertisers mistrust it, that’s because it proves to be not a huge opportunity.

6. Absolutely. As said before, I think the greater sponsored link opportunities lies in those searches that are not too much focussed and that are the searches where a user likes to see them presented on a larger web page. When you already know the name of the company you are looking for and type it in the Omnibox, well, pretty much chance you will ignore the sponsored link.

User who explicitly get Chrome from Google, a company that dominates 3/4 of the search business just won’t switch to Mozilla which doesn’t even have a search business or to Microsoft which hasn’t made a dent against Google so far. No other player has the depth and breath of Google’s search and related properties, expertise and ability to tie them together.