A variation of this - if you look at SEO traffic reports, people have gotten really lazy with typing and bookmarking domains and there is a huge amount of 'navigational search' traffic. You type 'Amazon' instead of 'Amazon.com', etc. etc.
In some case there really is no full search results page required if there is an obvious domain name resolution.
It could be a light search page, that just shows 'Did you mean Amazon.com or something else' - that page would automatically redirect after 5s (configurable) to amazon.com, unless you clicked 'something else' in which case it goes to a full SERP.
This light weight could help with cost, and could also maybe accounted for as a light query.
I know I can type the .com, but after years of not having to think about it, navigational search is now an expected convenience.
And ideally the solve should be automatic, not another bang, since we're trying to retain trained behavior, not change it.