One thing stands out in the Google Zeitgeist 2004 listings. The "popular brand names" listings.
Three of the top five sites are brands that exist ONLY online. They have only ever been functional as a website. Yet they've made it to the top five searches list. How many people must that take, who can't manage to type in a URL for a site whose very name is the URL, and have to get to a place as popular as Ebay by typing it into a search engine?
Internet Explorer doesn't even require you to type the whole URL. Just the name is enough; by default it jumps to the best result when searching from the address bar. (How many people actually know of and use the hold control and press enter feature in IE that automatically adds www and .com to the address?)
Although it isn't much better, at least when people use Yahoo to reach sites, it's because Yahoo is a popular "portal" that people start with everytime they open the browser. Google isn't even that, most people would be manually going to Google in order to do the search.
I can't imagine that so many people are looking for websites that TALK about Ebay that it would land the site at Google's #1 brand search.
Incidentally, I didn't know we could use the word Ebay again.
Three of the top five sites are brands that exist ONLY online. They have only ever been functional as a website. Yet they've made it to the top five searches list. How many people must that take, who can't manage to type in a URL for a site whose very name is the URL, and have to get to a place as popular as Ebay by typing it into a search engine?
Internet Explorer doesn't even require you to type the whole URL. Just the name is enough; by default it jumps to the best result when searching from the address bar. (How many people actually know of and use the hold control and press enter feature in IE that automatically adds www and .com to the address?)
Although it isn't much better, at least when people use Yahoo to reach sites, it's because Yahoo is a popular "portal" that people start with everytime they open the browser. Google isn't even that, most people would be manually going to Google in order to do the search.
I can't imagine that so many people are looking for websites that TALK about Ebay that it would land the site at Google's #1 brand search.
Incidentally, I didn't know we could use the word Ebay again.
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