Search vs. URL
Watching the TV last night I saw an advert for EMA (Education Maintenance Allowance) which instead of giving a URL suggested that the viewer "search for EMA online". This is the first time I've seen this type of advertising in the UK, although strangely only last week the article about search terms taking over from URLs in Japan over at cabel.name was doing the rounds. Searching for EMA across Google (first both paid and natural), Yahoo! (first paid, second natural) and Live (first paid, third natural) seems like this works in this instance, but I can't help but fear the torrent of spam that will start to follow major ad campaigns that feature particular terms.
As Cabel says in his article this change seems inevitable for all the reasons that he lists, but it sure is going to make management of search placement a lot more complex over the next few years.
Comments
The other day somebody at work wanted to show me a video on youtube.
He opened up his browser window.
Went to the address bar and typed "www.google.com"
Went to the search box and typed "you tube"
And then he searched for the video on youtube that he wanted to show me.
I asked and he didn't know what favourites are (we can't set the home page in the office).
The amazing thing was that in the middle of this I noticed that he actually had a customised iGoogle homepage with widgets on it.
He was quite adept at things within the browser window, but the address bar (save google), and other browser things like favourites were all things he didn't care / know about.
Posted by: Alex Andronov | March 29, 2008 04:14 PM
Sorry, but i think both the article and the view given here are wrong and naive ;).
In my view, these companies are doing something much more interesting with those campaigns that "listening to the user", it is more than they are trying to use them to cheat google page rank.
As you know google page rank corrects itself, if the result os a search term is clicked then that result has a higher chance to appear higher in the result list next time. So... with a directed campaing of planned search terms and indicating the user the desired outcome that they should click for you can actually improve your google page rank... which is far more interesting outcome than people remembering your domain.
Posted by: Sergio | March 31, 2008 10:34 AM