Japanese Advertisers Discover Zooko’s Triangle
Cabel Sasser, of indie developer Panic, reports from Japan:
“Within minutes of riding on the first trains in Japan, I notice a significant change in advertising, from train to television. The trend? No more printed URLs. The replacement? Search boxes! With recommended search terms!” [*]
He goes on to note how common it is for people to type URLs or domain names into their browser’s search box instead of the address field. To American geeks this seems clueless, but Cabel points out that in Japan it makes more sense, since URLs are in a foreign alphabet, so search words are much more memorable.
First off, this instantly reminded me of two favorite jokes:
- Homer Simpson, picking up the phone: “Operator! Get me the number for ‘911’!”
- Scott Pilgrim, on finding out that the cute girl he saw at a party in Toronto works as a delivery courier for Amazon.ca: “Hey, Amazon.ca, that’s the online bookstore or whatever, right? … What’s the website for that?”
But seriously: This is another example of Zooko’s Triangle, which basically says “names cannot be global, securely unique, and memorable, all at the same time”. URLs are global and unique, but not memorable, especially not in Japan; search terms are global and memorable, but not unique. Japanese advertisers are betting that you’re more likely to reach their site through keywords, even if nine competing sites show up next to it on Google, than if you forget the URL before you even get to a browser.
Marc Stiegler, on that page, predicted this:
“A good example of a nickname management system is Google. Type in a name, and Google will return a list that includes all the entities Google knows, to which the name refers. Google makes a mapping between these nicknames and their keys (if we think of the url of a page as a trusted-path-style key, which will be discussed later). Often enough to be interesting, the first item in the list will be the one you wanted. But it fails often enough, and endless pages of other choices appear often enough, to never leave us in doubt that these identifiers are not unique mappings to single keys. As is already true in the current world, in a world filled with petname systems, a key goal of marketing would be to get your nickname listed at the top of the Google rankings for that nickname.”
I wrote about this earlier, somewhere in the middle of my post FaceBook And Decentralized Identifiers”.
March 26th, 2008 at 10:58 AM
The Japanese have always been heavily into using the internet from mobile devices, so maybe that’s a factor too — easier on an i-mode phone to bang in a short search term than a full URL, right?
March 26th, 2008 at 12:23 PM
I’ve also seen this in an ad for a video rental service here is Australia. The line at the bottom of the ad said something like ‘Google Q’.
In fact I couldn’t remember the name of the company just now, but googled Q and there they were with an ad at the top of the result list.
March 27th, 2008 at 4:35 AM
When dealing with non-technical people (which I mostly do, these days) I find that I most often pass on websites by saying “Google _____, it’s the first link.” rather than offering the URL.
Even with technical people, a search term is faster to communicate verbally than any URL that would require spelling out.
March 27th, 2008 at 6:24 PM
I created telldodo.com to serve exactly this purpose: replace URLs with easy to remember, easy to pronounce, easy to spell UNIQUE keywords. Perhaps I should hook up with someone in Japan to create a Japanese version of telldodo. Let me know if you have an interest in developing this idea…
March 28th, 2008 at 9:18 AM
TellDodo — Clever idea! Are you using Oren Tirosh’s mnemonicode library to do the binary-to-phrase mapping? I use that in an app I’m currently developing, as part of a mechanism to allow people to verify each other’s public cryptographic keys.
April 1st, 2008 at 3:41 PM
Jens - telldodo doesn’t even try to do an intelligent mapping of the URL (or its contents) to the keyphrase. It generates a random key-phrase from a dictionary I carefully created to avoid ambiguities (eg sail vs sale), or it lets the user pick a specific key-phrase. The mnemonicode library sounds intriguing… I’m going to take a look at that. Thanks!