It's not a failure of literacy, it's a failure of URLs as a system. Which company has which URL is determined by a long set of events having to do with competing businesses, events and plain luck that even people here wouldn't care to unravel for most of the sites they visit. The best example I can think of now is when pitchfork (the music review site) was at pitchforkmedia.com, and pitchfork.com was owned by a company that sold hay.

Search, on the other hand, has failures, but those failures are rapidly fixed.