insight 

I was at the Centr meeting recently where a representative of JPRS, the registry for .jp (Japan) gave a presentation on the increased usage of search boxes in advertising in Japan instead of a URL.  Apparently some recent research showed that more than 35% of adverts in Japan carry an image of a search box with the appropriate search terms in the place of a URL.

I’ve started to notice advertisers occasionally doing something similar in the UK.  Here they tend to use the words “Search for” and then whatever the term is.

I guess that the advertisers are either very confident that their sites will come up as the number one on the list of responses, or they have an arrangement with the search companies to ensure it does.  There does seem to be some suggestion that this may be the case.

One of the key reasons for this practice in Japan, would appear to be that this gets around the issue of the requirement for URLs in Japan to contain both the local Japanese script characters and the latin characters .jp.  Maybe once IDNs are introduced at the root this trend will reverse?

It’s an interesting trend and we shall be monitoring whether this takes off in greater numbers here, and ultimately its impact on the domain name market.