Type-in traffic

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Type-in traffic is a term describing visitors landing at a website by entering a URL in a web browser's address bar. [1] This type of direct navigation includes users both navigating to known sites and discovering unfamiliar sites by manually constructing URLs out of search terms, removing invalid characters like spaces (by omission or hyphen substitution), and appending a top-level domain such as .com. It contrasts with other types of web traffic attributable to hyperlinks from web pages, browser bookmarks, or search results provided by search engines. [1]

History

Prior to 2002 most web browsers resolved type-in search strings via DNS to the .com top-level domain; thus entering 'mysearchterm' in the web browser's address bar would typically lead the user to http://mysearchterm.com/. This behavior changed as browsers evolved based on the 'default search engine' setting in the web browser's properties. Thus entering 'mysearchterm' in the address bar would now lead to an error page, as the computer is looking http://mysearchterm/ or to results from a search engine if a default is set. Much of Microsoft's Bing (formerly as MSN then Windows Live Search) high usage rank results from the error page traffic delivered via their dominant Internet Explorer browser. A significant percentage of Google's traffic originates from redirects via the Firefox and Google Chrome browsers and from the Google toolbar, [2] all of which take over type-in traffic search strings to the browser address bar.

References

  1. 1 2 "Direct Navigation: How It Affects Trademarked Brands". www.cadna.org. Archived from the original on 2013-05-29. Retrieved 2025-08-22.
  2. "Microsoft Quietly Making Untold Millions". Archived from the original on January 21, 2013. Retrieved 2007-06-14.{{cite web}}: CS1 maint: bot: original URL status unknown (link)
  3. "nyf026". Yahoo Business. Archived from the original on 2006-06-25.