This article continues immediately on from the first in the series titled,
"Search and John Battelle - The Inspiration".
The dilemma I faced was that John Battelle is a really smart guy. So rather than dismissing his views on domaining out of hand I found myself forking out my hard earned dollars and purchasing his audio book titled, "Search" for the long trip across the Pacific to the TRAFFIC conference.
For about 20 hours (I rewound sections) I listened to John read me his book via my iPod. The opening chapter started off by proclaiming that it wasn't going to be a book about the history of Google while the following six chapters did exactly that. Strange but true. I must admit it that the history lesson was engrossing and interwoven with a number of really interesting anecdotes that all related to "search".
The latter chapters addressed the future of search and compared the current search methodology to users typing at the DOS prompt. The premise being that search will be dramatically improved in the near future. The three main points that I came away from this section were:
1. The future of search is ubiquitous. Every device, all the time, anywhere.
2. The future is personal - psychographic targeting of content for individual users.
3. The future is intelligent - search engines becoming smarter about the context of a request.
The constant question I kept asking myself was, "How do these points impact domaining?" In my opinion owning a domain that inspires direct navigation type behaviour is like having the results from an intelligent search engine. For example, domains can now be reached by every device, all the time and anywhere. Direct navigation is ultimately personal at the point of contact and is intelligent because the user themselves got their directly.
I see that the difference between "search" and domains is that search can answer complex questions from a central point while domains answer complex questions in a distributed manner. There appears to be only a small difference between a massively scaled ocean of domains providing direct navigation solutions and "search". This may be one of the reasons why many users are by-passing search and are now typing addresses directly into the address bar of their browsers. This would suggest that the biggest threat to a search engine is massive numbers of domain names that provide the equivalent of search via the address bar. This is an interesting topic that needs additional thought.
From a domainers perspective this potentially means that the value of direct navigation domains will skyrocket as on mass they potentially provide a threat to search engines. We need only to look at the increasing levels of traffic heading towards "parked" domains to see that people are using the address bar more and more as a means of search.
This finally brings me back to dialoguing with customers. The principle of getting repeat customers to a domain is sound if it can be practically achieved. The challenge is two fold:
1. The business model
2. How do you establish a dialogue on a massive scale.
The final installment in the series will outline my own personal experience in developing a "dialoguing system" for domain owners.
Articles in the series:
Search and John Battelle - Part 1 - The inspiration
Source: Posted by Michael Gilmour — Original post on on
Whizzbangsblog — March 2, 2008
