Undoubtedly one of the silliest aspects of these early stages of Web technology is the URL. I’ve always thought that searching painfully for something small, typeable, memorable, brandable, and - most of all - available is an excessively tough way to start a company.
It has lead to all types of bizarre practices including domain name squatting and odd company names based on nonsense words. Finding a good URL is one of the most frustrating activities in launching a new company, and I was thrilled to find ManyWheels.com available 6 months ago.
The tyranny of the URL may be fading with the advent of Google Chrome search box in the same line as the URL. I now find myself less concerned about remembering the exact URL for company since typing and searching happen in the same user experience.
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This is also true in the new versions of Firefox and eventually IE. There is no need to type in www or .com any longer. Google will see a tremendous benefit in this through a larger number of searches.
Ryan,
Actually Chrome is a bit different because you can search in the same box. Thus it isn’t the same as not typing the whole url - you can actually type anything you would enter in the search box.
Thus all of my activity happens through one interface, so even if I don’t know the URL or even how to spell the company’s name it is still easy to find it.
@Kevin I think that’s what Ryan meant too (”..will see tremendous benefit in this through a larger number of searches”). Anyway, insightful post. I’m no Chrome fan, although I have to admit it has some neat features (but that in no way makes me want to use it over Firefox).
To be honest, I think the URL (or, more precisely, the URI), is too fundamental to the Web to eradicate, or even deprecate. Look at any publication by a medium to large sized business since 1998: memos, headed letters, flyers, handouts, etc. They all have one thing in common: they have a web address.
I’d be the first one to acknowledge that many (perhaps, even, _most_) websites screw up URIs. They don’t bother to use mod_rewrite or virtual folders, or the like, and you end up with poor-usability, inappropriate, unhelpful, and just plain weird URIs, that help no one, least of all the company whose website it is.
That has to stop.
But it _is_ stopping. Inadvertently, yes - even today, far from all webmasters make a concious choice to use usable URIs, but content management systems/blog engines such as Wordpress, Blogger, et al., do it for them.
Hurray for blogs! :-).
Basically, I think that properly structured, high-usability, and perhaps hierarchically structured URIs are such a benefit that they outweigh the disadvantages of having even most websites use poorly structured ones.
So that’s my two cents. Um, actually, judging by the comment length, perhaps it’s two dollars. Oh well.
Ryan is right. Firefox will search in the same box URLs are typed in.
Great comments everyone, thanks.
Re: Chrome vs. Firefox.
Yes, you can search in Firefox URL line But it isn’t stated as an explicit feature as it is in Chrome, and after running a few tests in Vista (I’m one of the 3 suckers who bought Vista) I can say that the execution is much, much better.
But my larger point is this: URL naming has been such a huge focus of the online world and slowly we see that breaking down as Josh so eloquently puts it.
Shout-out: The Josh Atkins Joshlog: http://jatkins94.tumblr.com/
It’s funny, it’s almost as if we’re going back to those keywords they used to have on AOL. Remember those? Ahh, the good old days.
I agree that urls (or URIs) aren’t the best way to manage web properties. They are much better then the alternative at the time they were created, which was IP addresses.
The internet, along with many other mediums, evolves over time. I’m sure people will think of URLs as quaint historic oddities in the future.
But it will be a good way off before they aren’t necessary for many, many applications.
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