Direct Navigation Cut Off at the Knees?
I may be terribly naive, and this may not be something new, but I just thought I would throw it out there: in Firefox 1.5 if you type in generic words without the dotcom it redirects you to the site occupying the first Google result for that keyword phrase. That is, if you type in “Digital Camera” it directs you to dpreview.com rather than digitalcamera.com.
IE 6 returns an MSN search results page, which makes me think that this is not something new and that the Direct Navigation industry has been suriving fine without the browsers trying to add a .com onto the phrase.
I wonder what kind of hit the traffic to the sites took when the browsers changed the way they handle the generic keywords. And what percent of traffic to the domains are referred by search engines versus people explicitly typing in the domain name.
