Something that’s bothered me for a long time is how we get to stuff on the internet – URLs.

Let’s look at a common example. Say I want to go to Yahoo. I go to my browser’s address bar and type this:

http://www.yahoo.com

Now let’s break that up into its components:

http – a web protocol. Great. Why do I care?

:// – a delimiter between the protocol and the hostname. Isn’t that obvious?

www. – the ‘hostname’ of the web site. Stands for world wide web. When this is used, it generally means the ‘default’ site. It’s also completely unnecessary. Ever wonder why you usually can send email without a hostname, like [email protected] and not [email protected]? Well that’s because when you send an email, it looks for a special addess where email to ‘boulter.com’ called an MX record. That means you can send email to @boulter.com and also get to a website at http://boulter.com and they could be completely different computers serving these purposes.

yahoo. – this is actually meaningful. I want to go to the site called yahoo.

.com – Yahoo is a commercial site. You don’t really care about that, but it’s in there.

So we’ve taken a 20-character URL and found only 5 characters that are meaningful to humans. That’s just wrong.

To be fair, many modern browsers like Internet Explorer will accept a url like ‘yahoo’, make some guesses, and eventually get you to Yahoo. Unfortunately it also changes the url displayed to http://www.yahoo.com/, basically telling people that this is the correct way to get to sites.

The first time I saw a URL on a billboard (at least 8 years ago when the web started to go mainstream) I thought to myself “How geeky? Do they actually expect people to remember that and type it all in?”

This bothered me so much in 1996 that I decided to try to fix it myself. The result was QuickFix, a little utility that allowed you to type in a ‘real’ name and sends you to the right site.

As I look at it now I see premonitions of the web today. The frames interface looks like the browser tools such as Yahoo Companion or the Google toolbar. The ‘type it and go’ interface is just like Google’s “I’m feeling lucky” button.

On the backend, QuickFix used DNS lookups, whois queries and yahoo searches to figure out the ‘best’ site to go to.

To be fair a tool like this was more useful then because the rules by which domain names were much less developed. A first come, first served system meant that domain ‘scalping’ and ‘squatting’ made many simple domain names dead or home to less prominent sites. The Weather Channel, for instance, could only be found at http://www.weatherch.com. No one was going to guess that one. One forward-looking company, virtualoffice.com, made a bundle when then secured a bunch of later extremely valuable domains like ofiice.com, news.com, and download.com.

I was so excited about QuickFix at the time that I got in touch with the people at Yahoo and tried to sell them on partnering with me on providing the site directory on the back end. They could in effect define addressing of web sites, making domain names irrelevent.

They told me they didn’t get it, but they were working on this site called ‘My Yahoo’ and were interested in having me come help build it. I said ‘no thank you’ because I had recently finished a summer internship in the Bay Area and decided I’d rather work in New England, close to my family and friends. I like to call that my 10 million dollar mistake. Yahoo stock options at pennies would be worth a fortune now. But hindsight is always 20/20 and I probably wouldn’t have gotten married if I moved west right away, so no regrets.

Back to URLs, a decade later, we still haven’t fixed the problem. Instead people have given up on trying to use URLs. They just go to their search engine of choice and try typing in what they’re looking for. This is why search engines are so important right now.

Many people are so search-engine oriented that they go into autopilot mode when surfing. A telling example is the fact that one of the most popular search terms on Yahoo is ‘yahoo’. Uhh, you’re already there.

There have been some attempts to fix this problem. Realnames was a startup that sold intuitive site names that would redirect users to the real URL. To use them you had to go to their site and there just wasn’t enough reason to do that. Eventually they did get integrated into Internet Explorer but quickly went bust after that.

AOL’s keywords are really nice and are popular enough that you’ll see them sometimes on billboards along with URLs. The problem again is that they’re often sold, only work when using AOL to access the web, and often send you to AOL’s own sites.

The problem doesn’t end with the first part of the URL’s either. It continues with the rest of the part after .com. One bandaid solution is sites like tinyurl.com and snurl.com which allow you to create very short urls that redirect to longer urls. These have to be created manually for each long URL however.

The good news here is that search engines tend to rank sites with simpler URLs higher, especially if search term is contained in the URL. The rapidly growing industy of ‘Search Engine Optimization’ is reinforcing better URLs.

Think of the cumulative wasted effort of hundreds of millions of web users typing in these unnecessary keys. Most people type very slowly anyway. How many cases of carpal tunnel syndrome could be avoided? You even need to use the shift button to get the colon.

As difficult as URLs are to type, they’re worse to speak. In english, the letter ‘W’ requires three syllables to speak. That’s nine syllables just for ‘www’! There was a great Crank Yankers episode recently where they made a crank call and had a guy write down this ridiculously long web address. I think he gave up after about 100 letters.

Well, I think I’ve adequately expressed my displeasure at the current state of addressing on the web. I hope you’ve learned some things about how the web works and you can use that to get around the web more efficiently.

There are a few things you can and should do to make surfing easier:

1) stop typing unncecessary parts of URLs. If you want to go to Yahoo, type ‘yahoo.com’. Skip the www. And all that other stuff.
2) if you try that and it doesn’t work (but www. does) send an email in to their site and tell them their site is broken and they’re losing traffic because of it.
3) if something like ‘site.com’ does work but it redirects you to www.site.com, also let them know. It should be the other way around.