{"id":54,"date":"2008-09-25T15:18:07","date_gmt":"2008-09-25T14:18:07","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.setfiremedia.com\/blog\/?p=54"},"modified":"2008-09-26T14:06:28","modified_gmt":"2008-09-26T13:06:28","slug":"how-friendly-will-a-url-ever-be","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.setfiremedia.com\/blog\/how-friendly-will-a-url-ever-be","title":{"rendered":"How Friendly Will a URL Ever Be?"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"I’m an address bar guy; I don’t use bookmarks and barely use a link toolbar. And somedays, my typing could be better – if\/when the new gTLDs<\/a> come in, the owners of ‘facebook.comk’ and ‘google.comk’ will get a good 50% of my surfing time and a catch-all on ‘setfiremedia.comk’ would receive all of my internal emails. I’m just as bad with .co.uk – the amount of traffic I send to ‘news.bbc.co.il’ and ‘news.bbc.co.yj’ is shocking.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

For Many, Search Engines Are The Web<\/h3>\n

Most people, of course, don’t use URLs this way. This isn’t because they are more or less error-prone in their typing, but rather because their primary experience of web navigation is different – search engines are the front door to the web to many; they are<\/em> the web to even more. This even holds true for when users do<\/em> know the URL – we’ve all watched, head in hands, people type fully-qualified URLs into Google.<\/p>\n

Organisations have caught on to this, and it interests me that we are witnessing a shift in how they direct you to their online presence from offline sources – adverts, brochures etc. It seems especially prevalent in government ads – the Royal Navy’s current TV advertising campaign, for example, simply tells the viewer to “search for ‘navy jobs'” for further details. The assumption, of course, is that they will rank #1 in whatever search engine the user choices. The risk, of course, is that somebody finds a way to hijack the listings<\/a> for this term. It’s an old joke, but anyone who’s ever searched for ‘french military victories<\/a>‘ knows what I’m talking about. Even ensuring you’ve got the top PPC hit won’t compensate for that level of negative PR.<\/p>\n

What’s interesting is that, for the sake of usability, organisations are choosing to add an additional stage to the process of finding their website<\/strong>. By directing people to search for a term and then click on the result, they’re actually lengthening the process in order to make it easier. Risk factors aside, it’s a pretty good idea, and a pretty major development.<\/p>\n

What Does The Future Hold For URLs?<\/h3>\n

So is natural language taking over, and are all attempts to improve URLs futile? Has the slow progress of the regulating bodies meant that we’ve had to find a better solution? Of course, some URLs are clever slogans themselves and add value to a product, but it seems that most are arbitrary identifiers, obfuscated by acronyms, abbreviations and dots, dashes and other de-humanised elements.<\/p>\n

What do you reckon? Are the unbelievable sums of money spent on domain names wasted? Should Google Search stop using the URL of a site as an indicator of relevance? Or will their omnibar<\/a>, or Mozilla’s ubiquity<\/a>, be the final nail in URL coffin?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I’m an address bar guy; I don’t use bookmarks and barely use a link toolbar. And somedays, my typing could be better – if\/when the new gTLDs come in, the owners of ‘facebook.comk’ and ‘google.comk’ will get a good 50% of my surfing time and a catch-all on ‘setfiremedia.comk’ would receive all of my internal […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":6,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[3],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.setfiremedia.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/54"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.setfiremedia.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.setfiremedia.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.setfiremedia.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/6"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.setfiremedia.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=54"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.setfiremedia.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/54\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.setfiremedia.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=54"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.setfiremedia.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=54"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.setfiremedia.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=54"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}