Navigational search – gaining access to a specific site or page by searching for the actual web address or a portion of it – is common, not just amongst the uninitiated (who you might say do it out of ignorance), but amongst the web savvy.
It’s actually astonishing how often people search for the complete web address and click on the corresponding search result to get to the site they are trying to navigate to. It makes me laugh every time I see my parents do this, but even more amazing is when the “web savvy” amongst us does this.
Jack Schofield at the Guardian:
As a “web savvy” person, I do it often, and Jeremy should know why. First, if I type into the search box instead of the address bar, it doesn’t matter if I make a typing mistake. Second, I might be guessing or have half-remembered the URL I want: it may look stange if I get it right, but often I don’t. Third, there are plenty of Web sites that are not very responsive, or include a lot of junk code. Rather than going to the site, I might actually want to look at it in Google’s cache first.
But thinking in terms of URLs for web access is so Web 1.0 don’t you think?
With Google refining its algos and providing special searches and with websites increasingly using URL rewriting, the need to use URLs for access and to use in-site searches will all but disappear.
For example, to access a Wikipedia article on a topic, I just type wikipedia <search term> into the Google search box. Most times a specific Wikipedia article is No. 1 on Google. Similarly to find a page on any other site, I type <domain> <search term>. This works even for low-ranked sites provided the domain is a sufficiently unique word; and only of course if the search term is likely to be in a page title. For special Google searches I type define <word>, books <search term> etc, or just a post code to find a location on Google maps, etc.
And in Firefox you don’t even need to use the search box as it will perform a search on words typed into the address bar (you can configure Firefox to use whichever search engine you prefer).
