URLs vs Queries in Japan


If you’re in Japan and look at the printed advertisements, you’ll notice the majority of companies that want you to follow up on the internet look the company up by searching for a キーワード kīwādo (“keyword”; Japanese-English for “search engine query”). The query will often be in a form input box, along with a mock mouse pointer hovering over a button marked 検索kensaku (search).

How do they guarantee that their landing page will show up? Probably by purchasing AdWords or similar word-based advertising on non-Google search engines. In Japan, that would be Y! Japan. Either that or they have a very high confidence that their landing page will come up and stay at first place in the search results. I’m sure that SEOs help a bit on the results side.

What’s interesting with this strategy is how unappealing it would be to the risk-adverse advertising market in North America. What happens if a competitors page shows up? Or a consumer with a grudge against your company or product shows up on the page? The U.S. tends to only use unique domain names, avoiding long URLs. For cases like new movies, many movie companies use a subdomain on top of a generic domain such as “the-movie.com” that they can use or control.

Interestingly, movies advertisements in the United States are now starting to do the Japanese method: they tell you to search for a certain keyword. Different from Japan, they are telling people to specifically use a certain search engine. For the movie “2012” at least, there are no advertisements that appear on the search result page. It should be noted that Sony Pictures is of course a Japanese company.

So if you want people to see the website for “Fanboys,” you may have to hope people will navigate to a terrible URL like http://www.fanboys-themovie.com/.

— Silicon Valley Insider

A few more reasons why Japanese direct consumers to their sites via query suggestions rather than give URLs:

  1. The ability to use Japanese kanji and kana. While IDNs exist, they are still not supported by older browsers and many mobile phone browsers.
  2. Young Japanese access the web more often on mobile phones than personal computers. Print and display ads at stations and inside trains are counting on this spontaneous access. It’s easier to launch newer mobile phone’s search than it is to type a URL on a numeric keypad. It should be noted though that QR Codes are ubiquious in Japan, as well as the built-in software in mobile phones to read them.
  3. Queries don’t need to conform to URL syntax rules, making them easier to remember.
  4. No need to worry about separate URLs for mobile and for the PC. Note that any webmaster worth their money should be able to make a URL that works for both mobile and full screen full feature browsers.
In some ways the Japanese tendency to use queries on their ads is similar to how advertisements use to show the AOL navigational keyword in addition to the URL back when AOL was popular in the U.S.

Not all Japanese companies use the search query method on their advertisements. Panasonic in Japan, for example, still prefers the URL approach.

HABIRU Edo
source: http://blog.havill.com

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