Cabel Sasser: URL’s Are Totally Out in Japan

http://www.cabel.name/2008/03/japan-urls-are-totally-out.html

junesix:

In Japan, ads display a search box with a suggested search term instead of the URL. Makes perfect sense when you consider that romanized URLs is completely Western-centric. In a character-based language, doing a search is far more efficient and easy to remember. Any companies doing business in East Asia would do well to acknowledge this important difference, especially in light of the heavy mobile Internet usage.

If you’re able to maintain search engine result dominance but have a difficult to remember domain name, this might be the better way to advertise as well.

I haven’t been to Tokyo in almost a year. Wonder when this bit flipped as I don’t recall this being the standard when I was spending time there.