Who was the one with the original idea to make the url bar double as a search bar (I mean person, not company - i assume the first company to do it was google?)
The first time I saw it was in Google Chrome way back when Firefox still had more traction. Back then both Firefox and Internet Explorer had separate url and search fields.
Pretty sure it was Nicholas Jitkoff[1] and his team. He had done Quicksilver[2] a few years back which popularized this single input interface for osx desktop.
started with ISP selling your mistyped dns queries to google or whichever search engine they could sign a deal.
from there there was a race to capture as much mistyped domains until google had the end-game idea to pay Firefox to send non-standards domains to google directly, not even wait for it to fail dns resolution.
when later google launched Chrome, initially as a cost saving for the firefox deal, they dialed the dns to search hack so aggressively that they broke the internet (search for chrome type ahead incident).
all search engines (called portals at some point in time) goal was to be the dns replacement. AOL had "keywords" which they advertised heavily in their tv channels like TNT ("we will be back with Terminator. see more at Terminator keyword on AOL")
