"Navigation is Navigation, Search is Search": What Would Happen if We Started Sending "Google.com" Search-Box Searches Directly to Yahoo.com

As a website developer the nice thing about owning generic names with type-in traffic is it makes you free.  You don't need to cow-tow to Google, fooling around with links in, links out, superfluous content, DMOZ, page-rank or worry about multiple URLs in order to get traffic. If Google doesn't want to list the content (or lack of content) on my sites in their index, so be it.

The problem is: On its way to becoming the dominant search engine, Google's search box has taken on attributes of the browser's address bar.  Many folks simply type the domain name they are looking for into Google's search box (.com appended). As I mentioned at the outset, all my names are set-up without the usual Google friendly sugarcoating.  I implement the way I think my users will be satisfied. Google though, goes out of it's way to exclude my actual domain names from their algorithmic results when you "type the exact matching domain-name into the Google search box". 

When you type "Antarctica.com" there is no room for ambiguity.  You want that URL. Type that domain into Google's search box however and you will not even get to see Antarctica.com on Google's front page! [as snoopy points out in comments we have blocked tit-for-tat] Colleagues of mine have found the same thing with their domain names. Does this make Antarctica.com worth less or get less traffic..  its hard to tell.  We saw a slight traffic falloff when this started happening in Q3 2006, but then traffic magically came back as dissatisfied surfers presumably began re-entering the domain name into their browsers address bar.  If anything it has diminished the quality of Google's user experiences [and ours] because our visitors (and we still get millions) say screw this..  I'm typing the name directly into my address bar. It reinforces the behavior that you don't go to Google to type domains or to the search-box for exploring the web.

I don't like it though because it seems so.. well ..  Evil.  Google doesn't have to like the fact that people type my names,  they don't have to like the fact that I run paid search advertising featuring Yahoo, they don't have to like my implementation; but when Google starts denying my intended visitors the ability to easily navigate to our network of sites by blocking their ability to link to the very domain-name they type -- that just smacks of the whole net neutrality error search hijacking thing that is going on more and more (OpenDNS .cm takeovers .. etc.). 

I get an awful lot of searches. I wonder what would happen if every visitor to 'my network' who typed Google.com into my 300,000 search boxes directly loaded Yahoo's page instead? Lets kick it up a notch.. If the top 5 domain portfolio holders who collectively command 300 million unique visits a month did this, you'd have some serious net-changing firepower.  Hmmm, but if we all subverted any site that wouldn't show our site, then before long, nobody could get anywhere... As we duke it out playing tit-for-tat the user experience suffers and the net becomes less easy to navigate.

It is a slippery slope.

Comments

[Snoopy]

"I wonder what would happen if every visitor to 'my network' who typed Google.com into my 300,000 search boxes got Yahoo?"

If you type in google.com in to pretty much any yahoo based ppc page you won't get a link directing you to google. It will be some kind of error message with a bunch of ppc links for other sites. I don't think google isn't doing anything that domainers aren't already doing.

With antarctica.com I get "We could't find any results for:google.com. Try these instead:"

***FS*** Thanks sincerely for pointing this out Snoopy.. This post's title (and my hamming it up) is in part intended to illustrate that this just isn't good for anyone. I am wondering what would happen if everytime somebody typed the Google.com domain, we automatically loaded Yahoo.com. We used to return 'any' domain typed in our search box as a link. Then in Q3 2006 we modified it (when Goog started doing it on theirs, to ours) tit-for-tat. Today we refresh generic results related to the name originally typed. Ultimately I don't think this is good for the user tho. In a perfect world I'd prefer all search-boxes (parked page search boxes included) to return a link to any URL typed, just as the browser's address bar does. That way there's a redundancy to the browser. It reinforces domain name based direct navigation and .. I just inherently believe its better if everyone links to everyone, giving users the choice to easily go where they want. I'm actually putting my money where my mouth is and changing all my sites in the next month to make that easier. But that's just me. I'll blog about it when I make the change.

(note: to avoid confusion.. I've edited the title of the post as well.. thanks again Snoop ;)

[damir]

Well first of all I have to congratulate on a nice blog, I try to came here on daily basis and find always some interesting read.
Regarding the subject of this post I am glad that I found something about it. I have felt Google's change and I have felt it harder than most of domainers ... why, let me explain in few words. I am building my own e-commerce site, let's call it mybrand.com, that is completely powered with direct navigation. Now, like you put it in your post it is quite nice and relaxing to not depend of the Google and the others and to allow yourself to not care about page rank, page optimizations and so on ... However some things you can not avoid. When I check ICA's direct search white paper traffic growth graph and compare it with my own version, with the difference that on my own I am tracking sales not traffic, the change from Q3 2006 is much more notable. Why is that, well the reason is that ignorance of Google's rules in building my own mybrand.com cost me to loose Google's searches for "mybrand.com" and those hits convert to sales at significantly higher rate. Hits from Google's search "mybrand.com" are not just simple visits, they are almost 100% buyers. So some comparison shopper which find him self in the situation when he did not find my site easily is going to competition and do not care what had caused the problem, at least this is what I would do in such situation.
So, where we are. We can wait until the Q3 2007 and growth will come back to normal and we can continue with ignorance of Google's rules, but the branding effect will always suffer, at least for those of us who are trying to develop something on their domains. However another positive side like you noted is of course that surfers will bit by bit learn to differentiate between address bar and search box, I've been so many times on the phone with less experienced friends who where telling me that there's nothing at the "example.com" in their words "only a page loaded with text" end the first thing to check with them is always "where exactly did you type" :-)
And for the end, of course from the position of a domainer I am certainly not the right one to complain about unfairness of the internet and talk about the surfers that did not come to the place they wanted to, my portfolio is far away from the clean one, but then again I'm also not the one who proudly put on my web page "do no evil" :-)

***FS*** Thank you very much for adding color Damir. I thought twice when writing the "feels evil' part because we now block searches to Google on our network; but however childish this might sound: "They did it first". I honestly think when Google did this, their clever programming talents decided to "improve the user experience".. unfortunately when you start screwing around with navigation .. thats the A-Bomb of user intent shaping. I had talked about developing a browser or a search engine .. or blind branding a search engine like MSN or a9.com ...people have asked me if I'm worried about the Google search thing happening in the browser. You can see by my example if the browser did what Google does the Internet would end: but beyond that, if I the browser closed in on the world I would band together with the 6 or 10 largest portfolio owners and get behind (or create) a browser that gave people the right to choose. 300 million uniques a day encouraging their visitors to download IE, or FF, or opera. Nobody has the "Reach" that a large domain network like that has.

[Rob Sequin]

Frank,

Great blog and contribution to the industry. What I have found (and you certainly don't need any advice from a little cheese mouse like me :-) is that my domains may not show up as a link in the search results, they do show up as text in search results because I have ALL my domains listed for sale across 20 pages at my SearchDomainsForSale.com site (sorry to promote my site but I think it's a good example of how people might want to design a site so their domain names show up in search results)

For example, try my CapeHelp.com or HandheldSolutions.com or any other name listed for sale on my site. Every name that I just tried shows up in the text of search results with a link to my SearchDomainsForSale.com page because it is content on that page.

So, maybe if domain portfolio owners made a directory or list of their domains for sale, at least the search engines would pick up the page that they reside on.

***FS*** First thanks .. and I'm a cheese mouse too.. just have a bit more cheddar ;) I notice that my names (as text within pages) come up in the algo results.. just not the navigation link. I will try restructuring the pages and stop blocking SE spiders.. still if google has a one-box for "pounds to ounces" they should be smart enough to undserstand that their users who type a domainname.com, want 'that' name. I think they know what they're doing. They look at the paid-search content and make a judgement that they don't want to display the link. That judgement is the slipery slope.. (I know you get this.. just making you my foil so I can repeat it)