Direct navigation describes the method individuals use to navigate the

World Wide Web The World Wide Web (WWW), commonly known as the Web, is an information system enabling documents and other web resources to be accessed over the Internet. Documents and downloadable media are made available to the network through web se ...

in order to arrive at specific

website A website (also written as a web site) is a collection of web pages and related content that is identified by a common domain name and published on at least one web server. Examples of notable websites are Google, Facebook, Amazon, and Wikip ...

s. Direct navigation is a 10-year-old term which is generally understood to include

type-in traffic Type-in traffic is a term describing visitors landing at a web site by entering a keyword or phrase (with no spaces or in place of a space) in the web browser's address bar (and adding .com or any other gTLD or ccTLD extension); rather than follow ...

. Direct navigation traffic was first discovered circa 1996. The few lucky

domainer Domain name speculation, popular as domaining in professional jargon, is the practice of identifying and registering or acquiring generic Internet domain names as an investment with the intent of selling them later for a profit. The main targets ...

s who had premium names and analyzed their traffic found people were typing in their domain names and bypassing

search engines A search engine is a software system designed to carry out web searches. They search the World Wide Web in a systematic way for particular information specified in a textual web search query. The search results are generally presented in a l ...

. Many of them immediately realized the potential of these domain names. At that time the direct navigation segment of the

was born. Domainers describe direct navigation as an

Internet The Internet (or internet) is the global system of interconnected computer networks that uses the Internet protocol suite (TCP/IP) to communicate between networks and devices. It is a ''internetworking, network of networks'' that consists ...

user navigating to a website directly through the browser

address bar In a web browser, the address bar (also location bar or URL bar) is the element that shows the current URL. The user can type a URL into it to navigate to a chosen website. In most modern browsers, non-URLs are automatically sent to a search eng ...

. They bypass online

by typing a name like "hotels" and adding ".com". For that reason direct navigation traffic is more valuable than search engine traffic since it is better targeted. Short words that describe large segments of a market are the most valuable direct navigation names. Domainers call these names premium names and they have sold in the millions of dollars year after year since 1997. Marketers also include bookmarked traffic in the direct navigation group. Domainers do not consider bookmarked traffic as direct navigation since in most cases they do not involve a direct navigation premium domain name. A

bookmark A bookmark is a thin marking tool, commonly made of card, leather, or fabric, used to keep track of a reader's progress in a book and allow the reader to easily return to where the previous reading session ended. Alternate materials for bo ...

is made when an internet user actively adds a

URL A Uniform Resource Locator (URL), colloquially termed as a web address, is a reference to a web resource that specifies its location on a computer network and a mechanism for retrieving it. A URL is a specific type of Uniform Resource Identifi ...

to their list of bookmarked pages. This is very different from using the browser address line to navigate to a premium domain name like hotels.com. Hence the inclusion of bookmarked traffic is not included in the domainer's version of the direct navigation market. A 2005 study of Internet traffic by WebSideStory's StatMarket division revealed that direct navigation traffic such as browser

, bookmarks of existing sites, and visits to existing, known

domain names converts into sales for advertisers at 4.23% of total visits compared to 2.3% for product and service related searches performed via the search box at search engines such as

Google Google LLC () is an American Multinational corporation, multinational technology company focusing on Search Engine, search engine technology, online advertising, cloud computing, software, computer software, quantum computing, e-commerce, ar ...

and

Yahoo Yahoo! (, styled yahoo''!'' in its logo) is an American web services provider. It is headquartered in Sunnyvale, California and operated by the namesake company Yahoo! Inc. (2017–present), Yahoo Inc., which is 90% owned by investment funds ma ...

. In September, 2008, the first direct navigation search engine, ubexact.com was released. In addition to providing results by type in traffic, the search engine utilized new proprietary technology that was able to provide ''in context'' search results from one URL to the next URL.

References

Online advertising {{web-stub