The death of the URL?

I recently came across an article lamenting about how the URL is dying out, and it got me thinking.  That article is worth a read, actually (but be sure to come back here for my take on it too!) - it raises some interesting points about the way we use the internet, and what we might expect to come soon.

Some history

Way back in the days before the internet was out of nappies, URLs didn't even exist.  If you wanted to get some information you had to enter the IP address of the server.  Those who saw the benefit of the internet from the start got into the habit of memorising IP addresses of frequently accessed web sites so they could get around faster.  Then some bright spark thought it would be easier to give each IP address a recognisable name, and thus was born the web address.

The next step was giving people a way of finding web sites that they hadn't been to before, and so search engines began springing up.  Suddenly, instead of having to know all those addresses we just had to remember one and search for what we're looking for.  Google has probably done more than most to bring this searching technique into mainstream usage, so much so that "googling" has become a verb in its own right.

The problem

And this, I think, is where the next phase starts to take over, even if we're only just beginning to realise it now.  Allowing people to search for information from across the world reduces the importance of the URL.  A catchy or recognisable domain name is no longer as important as being listed positively in search engines.  I've seen this most obviously in people who are only now beginning to discover the internet - in particular old and young people, people who didn't grow up with the URL.  For them, Google is the internet.  If they want to find something, even if it's a site they go to all the time, the way they get to it is to type it into Google and find it in the results.  If you give them a URL, they don't know what to do with it, because they never use the browser's address bar and so don't realise what it's for.

The article I linked to at the beginning identified this problem too, and suggested that it was a bad thing.  I'm not so sure.

Seeing the light

From a usability perspective, erradicating the URL from everyday browsing is surely a good thing.  The URL is cumbersome, unsightly, complicated, technical, and requires users to accurately type something in.  We certainly don't expect visitors to type in URLs when they're on your web site - you provide navigation links to your pages, so that the information is just a click away.  If visitors had to type in each URL to get from one page to the next it would be a nightmare.

And let's face it, the URL is ugly.  What's with all those backslashes and colons and dots and things?  It doesn't look very neat, it bears no resemblance to anything else we use in life, and that makes it all seem so redundant.  Yes, there are technical reasons for them all being there, but for a non-technical purpose it all seems to superfluous.

The more you look at the web, the more we have tried to make it easy for people to get around by just clicking.  We have adverts to click on to take you to other web sites.  We can share interesting web pages by including a link in an email.  There are sites like Digg and StumbleUpon that show you sites you might be interested in.  There are a whole host of URL-shortening services like bit.ly and is.gd that make sharing long web addresses simpler.  Web browsers allow you to bookmark pages you visit often, saving you from having to enter the URL yourself.  Web browsers like Safari and Chrome have a 'most visited' grid showing pages you've visited recently to make getting to them even quicker.  Firefox allows you to type any part of a URL into it and it will search its history to find matches.  Several browsers make educated guesses at completing domain names for you (so you type in "apple" and it guesses you mean "http://www.apple.com").  Chrome allows you to search right from the address bar, further diminishing the difference between the URL and the search term.  There has even been a recent move to leaving out the 'www.' part of the url (twitter.com, wordpress.org, crossring.com, etc).  And I've noticed a lot of reputable companies advertising their products on tv by inviting people to search for a phrase rather than giving their actual web address.

All these things have the same aim - to make it easier for us to get around the web.  And let's face it, the web is so enormous now that we really do need a helping hand every now and then.  With domain names so cheap and readily available, finding a short domain name is actually quite difficult now, so new web sites are having to register increasingly long and complicated domain names because the obvious choices have already been taken.

This is what it all comes down to: in all honesty, I would rather click a link than type in a URL.

The future

Where will all this lead?  It's quite possible that eventually we'll find browsers being distributed with the address bar hidden by default, still there for the power users but generally ignored by everyone else.  We will very soon be in a situation where simply having a web site is not enough - we will all have to be paying search engines to include us in their results, otherwise no one will be able to find us.  URLs themselves could be stripped back to their bare minimum, getting rid of the "http://www." bit completely, and not worrying about the bit of the URL after the domain name because we can rely on the site's navigation instead.  And if this is what the end users want, maybe the technology will just have to adapt to make it possible.

What do you think?  Is the death of the URL a bad thing?  Or is it the start of a shiny new future where the web is simpler and more accessible?

Share this page:

This post was originally published on www.matthewdawkins.co.uk.
Copyright © Matthew Dawkins 2009

About Matthew Dawkins

Matthew is a web designer based in Somerset, UK. He has a passion for CSS and design, and runs his own web design business.