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surfing these days
Users know where they want to go and go there
By Marty Beard
The catchphrase "surfing the internet" may be heading toward obsolescence, and the reason is that fewer and fewer people are actually "surfing" nowadays.
They are spending less time looking for destinations and more time at those destinations.
Moreover, more and more users are going to sites directly, bypassing search engines entirely, by either typing in a URL or clicking on a bookmark.
If this seems only logical, consider that just several years ago it was common for inexperienced users to type site addresses into search engines, mistakenly thinking that it was the way to go to a site.
Credit the rising sophistication of users as the medium becomes more mainstream.
"More and more, internet users seem to know exactly where they want to go," says Geoff Johnston, vice president of product marketing of WebSideStory’s StatMarket division, which recently completed a study on the issue.
"Web surfers are becoming more savvy, and the technology has advanced."
The study found that 58 percent of U.S. internet users say they reach their online destinations by either typing the name directly into the URL box in the browser window or clicking on bookmarked or "Favorites" lists of frequently visited sites.
That's a healthy increase.
A year ago 50 percent of U.S. web users navigated the internet this way.
As recently as February 2001, Alexa Research determined that a surprising number of web surfers were entering web site names in full into the search box of their start pages, rather than entering the URLs into their browser address windows.
This appeared to account for a large but untold share of traffic for the major portals.
Surfing behavior has evolved for three main reasons. Users have grown adept at using the internet and the technology is better.
No less important, the major destination sites have now successfully branded themselves.
In the early days of the web, points out Johnston, users did in fact surf, much as TV couch potatoes might run up and down the remote, clicking on every link they found to see where it might take them.
"At one point all web sites were created equal, be it Amazon or somebody’s personal site," Johnston says. "You could end up on one accidentally because everybody clicked on everything."
Since then, the novelty of the internet has worn off, and now users usually log on with a purpose and pursue that purpose, taking far fewer side trips out of curiosity as to what they might find.
At the same time, improvements in technology have brought about more efficient web browsers and search engines, such as Google, making it easier for surfers to get to their destinations without a lot of the wasted motion of the past.
"Web users don’t have time to rummage all day long. We can go where we want to go and that’s it," Johnston says.
Additionally, he notes, we have seen the rise of major web brands of the sort that didn't exist a few years ago, such as Amazon. Now not all sites are created equal; there are the big players, and many, such as Amazon, have become household names on a par with off-line competitors.
"This trend indicates that branding is indeed taking hold on the web," Johnston says.
But Johnston notes that, while fewer users are relying on search engines to get to sites they know, the engines will most certainly remain a vital part of the web, in no small part because of the burgeoning growth of new sites every day.
In the sense of finding the unknown on the web, search engines are more needed than ever, and the more efficient the search engine the better, even though these days they drive just 10 percent of web activity.
"Think of it this way: If the library’s getting bigger, you can less and less afford to just walk down the aisle to find a book. Those who are using the web are doing less and less of that," he says.
February 15, 2002 © 2002 Media Life
-Marty Beard is a staff writer for Media Life.
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