Have search engines rendered domains obsolete?

Do domains matter anymore? Chris Matyszczyk at Cnet doesn’t seem to think so. In what is actually a pretty interesting read, he argues that while having a generic keyword domain used to be important, so few people directly type web addresses into their browsers that a good domain doesn’t a difference.

Matyszczyk has a point. A decade ago, it wouldn’t be uncommon for someone to simply search for what they wanted by typing it followed by .com or .co.uk in their browsers. With the popularity of search engines, this practice is rare. If I want a camera, I’m not going to go camera.com. I’m going to search Google.

As Matyszczyk puts it:

But don’t most people simply go to the little search box, type in the name of what they’re looking for, and search?

If it’s something they want to go back to, they’ll bookmark it. But they won’t remember what the URL is. For the simple reason that they don’t need to. The Bingoogle fraternity does it for them.

But I think the idea that domains are now useless is absurd. Twenty years ago, you could have argued that a business’s name didn’t matter because everyone used the phone book to find goods and services.

A solid, generic domain is not only easy to remember and brandable, but can be spread via word of mouth and looks more attractive on search engine result pages and in advertisements. Sorry, but domains will be here for many years to come.