This is really cool. This is my favourite kind of idea; one that changes something fundamental in a succinct way.
This makes me wonder how important domains are at all. My mum never even thinks about the domains for the websites she visits, she just types in 'ebay' and Google does everything for her.
The only time I think about URLs (outside of coding) is when I have to share a link with someone, but I wonder if even that could be replaced with a sufficiently advanced search engine.
Google search indexing might be one downside of this system, as Google tends to give a lot of weight to domains that match your search term. But in this case the actual domain is a "nonsense" hash.
Perhaps the browser extension could be set so that whenever a search term is entered, it submits Google searches for both the raw text and its hash. If Google has indexed a domain that is a hash, and that exact hash is submitted as a query, you would get the right result as #1 every time.
This makes me wonder how important domains are at all. My mum never even thinks about the domains for the websites she visits, she just types in 'ebay' and Google does everything for her.
The only time I think about URLs (outside of coding) is when I have to share a link with someone, but I wonder if even that could be replaced with a sufficiently advanced search engine.