Honestly that is probably safer. Having a typo in the url could Easley give you a phishing link. However, I also have gotten fishing adds when looking websites up so it’s not cut and dry at all.
For a good while if one searched for a (Dutch) gov institution or business google shows you the (free to call) phone number as a clickable link but the anchor has a different link to a paid per minute redirecting service. I know plenty of people who found the weird 15-50 euro entry on their bill.
Oh no, it's not. Google's ads have been used to do phishing a lot. And - at least a few years ago, it was extremely difficult to report such ads.
Perhaps it has improved recently, but it used to be a plague in crypto - people getting ads for phishing sites instead of legitimate ones, losing money, and Google being unresponsive to reports.
Honestly I think while this seems absurd if you're relatively knowledgeable about the internet, it's really not something that should be surprising or even particularly shameful? Like, why wouldn't they if it works, is easier to remember, and makes sense to them?
The reasons this is actually potentially bad are pretty deep in the internet wonk weeds, where you get into questions of gatekeepers and provinance of information and it shouldn't be surprising most people don't care about those things: those of us who do have failed to provide them with better tools.
On some level it's a little like saying "my dad sent me an email and he didn't use pgp! Can you believe it!??"
Instead of writing facebook.com in the URL-bar, they search for facebook and click the first link...