Type AB.ca into your URL bar (1.Viewing)

Type AB.ca into your url bar

What do you notice?

Now type DN.ca into your url bar

What do you notice is different?

Not sure if this is where you where you're heading here, but when my browser (Firefox) can't resolve ab.ca, it tries to resolve www. ab .ca (spaced so it isn't turned into a non-working link) and then displays an error message as that still doesn't resolve.

I'm sure that any difference is due to the fact that ab.ca would be on the Public Suffix List:

https://publicsuffix.org/

whereas DN.ca wouldn't be. It's like the difference between co.uk and dn.uk.

In chrome dn.ca goes to the obvious but ab.ca goes to search mostly about Alberta topics.

I found it interesting that instead of not resolving and google handling it as a URL it goes directly to search.

Personally I have not seen that and I think it should be handled as a URL and go to a not resolved page like every url that does not have a home.

To me it almost looked like google did not recognize it as a url.

As I noted, it's not treated as a URL, because it's a domain suffix. Try to navigate to mb.ca (Manitoba) or on.ca (Ontario) or co.uk or com.cn or similar public suffixes, and the browser will treat them the same way.

However, you can override this behaviour, by typing in the "http://" too, e.g. type in:

http://ab.ca/

or

https://ab.ca/

and it will try to navigate there.