How Google killed the shortcut

Posted: April 21st, 2011 | Author: | Filed under: Content, Copy, SEO | 6 Comments »

Putting a web address on your print campaigns no longer works.

A couple of weeks ago, we put a shortcut URL on a letter we were sending to a few supporters about a project in Uganda: “www.actionaid.org.uk/giriki” is what we printed at the bottom of the page. We included the ‘www’  because we knew that this group weren’t particularly digitally savvy, and would understand it better if they had the World Wide Web prefix. 40% of them typed it into their address bar, and ended up in the right place.

But 60% of them did this:

typing a URL into Google

And because we’d used a 301 redirect to a newly published page for SEO reasons too boring to explain, they ended up with a search that had the wrong page as the top result.

People no longer know what the address bar is for

For anyone who came to the internet after about 2006, the Google widget in your browser is what you use to navigate the web. The address bar is just a weird set of letters and punctuation that changes every time you hit a link.

Those late adopters now represent a huge proportion of Internet users: last month alone, Google saw 226,000,000 searches for ‘gmail’. And this is what Google predicts if you put ‘www.’ into a search:

People are SO fucking stupid

If you want your audience to go from print or display advertising to your website, you need to tell them what to search for on Google, not what to type in the address bar.

And Google’s grip on the web gets a little bit tighter…

  • Joe

    Great piece, really exciting news for me – I hate URLs. I see this less as Google killing the shortcut, and more as the first step in search / QR destroying the livelihoods of scum sucking URL cuckoos.

  • http://behindblueeyes.co.uk Blue Eyes

    Wow this is all news to me. I was an early adopter and so I use the Google main page as my homepage and search from there. Or, more often, type the URL into the URL box of my browser. I actually dislike the google predictive search box. Although it is often spookily prescient of what I am looking for (making me feel rather less like a person) when you try and type something different or move down the list it updates and I have been sent to the wrong search results because of it.

    I have noticed that a lot of brands now do not advertise their web site address but their Facebook page address.

  • http://www.googledigook.com buenosam

    Except that URL cuckoos now have a whole new outlet for their talents. You can't make money from squatting brands anymore (because nobody is typing in the URL and hoping for the best), but because Google search ranking gives such huge importance to keywords in URLs, there's a huge amount of cash to be made from squatting on real words. The Royal Wedding has had to settle for http://www.officialroyalwedding2011.o..., because URL cuckoos got in on their URLs so far in advance.

  • http://www.googledigook.com buenosam

    Facebook are as bad as google in this sense. As soon as large numbers of people start relying on proprietorial software for the basics of their web browsing, the development of the internet gets skewed in favour of those companies. It's why Microsoft almost managed to break the whole thing in the mid 1990s – because they were able to put that bit 'e' on everyone's desktop, they could invent their own web standards and everyone had to follow because they had such a huge share of the browser market.

  • http://profiles.google.com/richard.m.elliot Richard Elliot

    And Google’s grip on the web gets a little bit tighter…

    Do you think we're going to see a Google backlash? I've been expecting one for about 5yrs and it doesn't seem to happen. People just seem to be falling more in love with Google.

  • http://www.googledigook.com buenosam

    There's a quiet backlash that's been around for quite a while – plenty of geeks are pretty disturbed by the scale of Google, and they write about it in the Guardian, and BoingBoing and Wired. But it's hard to build any real rage against something that's so good at what it does.

    Today, I'm going to use Google Docs, Google Mail, Android, Google Search (obviously), Google Maps, and Google Analytics – and I'm going to use them because they're the best free products in their sector by a huge margin.

    I'm also a fairly regular user of YouTube, Blogger, Goggles and AdWords (who I needed to research the above article, and who give very large amounts of free advertising to charities). Basically, and in spite of many reservations, I still love Google.