Browser Address Bar

How do you copy and paste some text?  Edit->Copy?  Right-click?  Ctrl-C?  Just select it?  In Linux, all of these are valid choices and how you copy and paste text may say something about you understand software interfaces.  Are the people who haven’t learnt quicker methods than edit->copy the ones that are typing urls into search bars?

Last week, data was released about search market share for dating websites in June.  The results are unsurprising, more than 10% of the search terms were for URLs and almost all of the queries were something that adding .com to would have worked.  So what’s going on?  Are people not smart enough, or not interested in, remembering domain names?  Do people still not understand what a URL is?  Do people get confused between the url bar and the search bar?

In Japan, whether it’s because of this or because of limited availability of domain names, offline advertising for websites has moved away from mentioning domain names and has started telling people to search Google for the brand name.  I’m undecided as to whether that is unbelievably smart or unbelievably dumb; when the company’s website remains at number one search position then it works, as soon as somebody else manages to get number one spot it’s an epic fail.

Search Google for the domain name of a company and something interesting happens in the results.  If the company is big, then they will likely have bought top spot to ensure that people reach their site.  If they’re smaller or are actively fighting brand name infringement then paid results will be more limited.  The sort of people who will enter a url into a google search instead of the address bar are also more likely to click on the paid search positions, and so there’s clearly a large market built out of stupidity.

That’s not to say all search queries for domain names are made out of stupidity though.  Sometimes it’s interesting to see what competitors have paid listings, sometimes it’s interesting to see what appears on a website that you aren’t finding (by searching site:example.com), and sometimes you want to search your own domain to see what your stupid users are seeing.

If we tought people to use the internet correctly, to remember urls and enter them in the correct box, to know the difference between paid and organic search results, to tune out (or block) the advertising, to boycott ISPs who add advertising to user’s browsing, what difference would it make to the economy of the internet?  Do we rely on these stupid users to pay our way, or would the internet become so much nicer if the advertising, spam and scams that were targetting them disappeared completely?