CYBERSPACE – Why, if a surfer knows he or she wants to go to Yahoo.com, would they first go to Google.com and search for “Yahoo,” or even “Yahoo.com?”Stan Schroeder of FranticIndustries.com notes that “lately many users have all but stopped typing domain names directly in the web browser, and started using Google instead. Instead of writing ‘myspace.com’ as the address, they write ‘myspace’ into Google.”

Schroeder notes that many of the terms among Google’s top search terms, like “bebo,” “facebook,” “amazon,” “myspace” and other well-known websites “aren’t really searches at all – these terms are mostly written by users who know exactly which page they want, but they’ve gotten used to using Google instead of the address bar.”

DailyDomainer.com suggests one cause for the recent up-tick could be the way that some browsers handle incomplete strings entered into the address bar.

“Entering a term like ‘yahoo’ (without the .com extension) into the Firefox address bar actually performs a Google search and redirects the user to the top search result,” notes DailyDomainer.com. “Some people are using this shortcut intentionally, while others know nothing about domains and believe that this is the way the Internet is supposed to work.”

DailyDomainer further notes that the Google toolbar, which has been installed by many users worldwide, is easily confused with the address bar, which may contribute to significant accidental searching.

Also noted in Web trends for 2006 was the tendency of many surfers to forego use of search engines entirely, and navigate by simply enter the subject they are looking for directly into their browser’s address bar, with .com appended to the end of the term.

“While search engine traffic is an essential part of any popular website’s success formula, branding and direct navigation may be just as important,” observes DailyDomainer, adding that “Domainers know that .com domains typically value 10 to 20 times as much as their .net and .org counterparts, not only because they are more brandable, but also because they get accidental traffic originally destined for all other extensions.”

What do these trends mean for the adult industry? The trends likely are not as significant within the adult sphere as they are in the realm of “mainstream,” non-adult sites; while search engine traffic is still a prized commodity, the competition for frequently-queried terms is intense, and good type-in domains are hard to come by in this day and age.

The data could provide one clue, however, why the conversion ratios subscription adult sites see from search engine traffic are not what they once were. If current members, in large numbers, are returning to the sites to which they already subscribe via searching for those sites via Google and other major search engines, this practice has the effect of creating an illusion of new, “unsold” customers.