URLs are out. Search boxes are in...?

[Stephanie Romanski]

I ran across this blog on BoingBoing this morning and I'm very interested in the idea of using the search box/keyword idea the next time I need to promote something on/for our website. I can see it being useful for promoting different section, or a special series - anything that might have a rather long URL.

The downside, I suppose, would be the potential for a search turning up a competitor's site, or if your section isn't floating at the top of the search results. As a test, I typed 'pets' and 'theindependent' into my Google bar, and our new Pets section was the second result. BUT, if I type in 'pets' and 'the independent,' it doesn't turn up in the first 50 results. So I suppose you'd need to pick your keywords carefully.

I just wonder if something like this could be at all useful for pimping a blog or forum or something.

Kind of a lame first blog eh? I just really liked the article.

[Zac Echola]

NY Times and others buy Google keywords for news items. I could definitely see this as a good pitch.

I know some papers ask readers to search a keyword at the newspaper.com, rather than saying "go here, then click here." That way, at least if you have your own search box, you have some control over the results.

Search is a primary interaction with the Web and I think it's a much better way to pull readers.

[Mark Hamilton]

About 18 months ago, I noticed that the bulk of my surfing was now through search, to the extent that if I want to go to the Canon web site I'm as likely to type "canon" into the search box as the URL box. The good news is that its easy enough to set up customized Google searches for individual or even multiple sites. See this: http://www.google.com/coop/cse/