Christopher Finke writes about software, woodworking, and other creative endeavors.

What do people type in the address bar?

Update: URL Fixer was acquired and is now hosted at http://urlfixer.org/

Earlier this year, I added a feature to URL Fixer (a browser add-on that fixes errors in URLs that you type in the address bar) that collects anonymous usage stats from users who opt in in order to help improve the ways that URL Fixer corrects typos; the collected data includes domains that are typed in the URL bar as well as the locale (language/country) of the user who typed them.

I now have six months of data, and I’ve run some statistical analysis on it in order to share some interesting stats with you. (If I were more creative, I would make an infographic out of this information.) Note that this data does not include bookmarked links or links that users click on in websites. It is strictly domains that have been typed directly into the address bar.

Care to guess the most commonly typed domain? That’s right: facebook.com. It was typed almost three times as often as the second most popular domain, google.com.

The top 10 domains account for 20% of all typed domains.

facebook.com 9% twitter.com 1.1% amazon.com 0.5%
google.com 3.3% mail.google.com 0.6% reddit.com 0.5%
youtube.com 3.3% yahoo.com 0.6%
gmail.com 1.1% hotmail.com 0.6%

The most popular TLD for typed domains is .com, followed by .org, .net, and .de.

.com 63%
.org 4%
.net 4%
.de 4%
.ru 2%
.hu 1%
.fr 1%
.co.uk 1%
.br 1%

 

The top 17 TLD typos are all variations of .com. In order of frequency, they are .com\, .ocm, .con, .cmo, .copm, .xom, “.com,”, .vom, .comn, .com’, “.co,”, .comj, .coim, .cpm, .colm, .conm, and .coom.

The website that appears to benefit the most from users mistyping a legitimate URL is faceboook.com (count the o’s). It’s a scammy website set up to make you think that you have been chosen as a “Facebook Winner.” However, it is only typed once for every 7,930 times that someone correctly types facebook.com. (googe.com and goole.com are runners-up in this category, albeit with much less scammy sites in place than faceboook.com.)


49.5% of domains are typed with a leading “www.”.

The most popular non-.com/.net/.org domains: google.de, vkontakte.ru (a Russian social network), and google.fr.

The only locales where neither Google nor Facebook control the most popular domain are ru-RU (Russia – vkontakte.ru), fi-FI (Finland – aapeli.com, a gaming website), ko-KR (Korea – fomos.kr, an e-sports website), and zh-CN (China – baidu.com).

How does domain length correlate with typing frequency?

Domain Length vs Frequency Graph

(Facebook is to thank for the spike at 12 characters.)

How about alphabetical order? Has the old trick of choosing a site name early in the alphabet in order to show up above the fold on DMOZ had any lasting effect?

Facebook and Google certainly make their letters stand out, but there doesn’t appear to be a correlation between the first letter of the domain and its popularity.

None of the domains with more than a 0.0005% share are unregistered, indicating that this kind of usage data would not be very useful to a scammer or phisher looking for new domain names.

Posted

in

, , , , , ,

by

Christopher Finke

Tags:

Comments

59 responses to “What do people type in the address bar?”

  1. Michael Kaply Avatar
    Michael Kaply

    I totally mean to go to http://faceboook.com, man. I want to be a winner!

    Reply
  2. jason y Avatar
    jason y

    I wonder how much people use the Google search bar in Firefox to do their searches–do you think that would make the Google/Facebook numbers more comparable?

    Reply
  3. Alex Limi Avatar
    Alex Limi

    Filed as https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=673946

    Reply
  4. Christopher Finke Avatar
    Christopher Finke

    jason, I’m sure (but have no way of confirming) that searches from the search bar and the address bar greatly outnumber any single domain. The high number of people typing “google.com” in the address bar before ostensibly doing a search surprises me though.

    Reply
  5. Relequestual Avatar
    Relequestual

    I like that “non www” is JUST winning. Interesting to see the results =]

    Reply
  6. Aaron Avatar
    Aaron

    Ctrl+Enter would seem to solve some of these typos.

    Reply
  7. Brian Warner Avatar
    Brian Warner

    Great data! Can you distinguish between URLs that were manually typed into the address bar and those which were cut-and-pasted from elsewhere? One of my projects would be influenced by a theory that folks are willing to cut-and-paste relatively long URLs even though they’re only willing to actually type short ones.

    Reply
  8. Christopher Finke Avatar
    Christopher Finke

    Brian – I can’t make that distinction; it’s an interesting angle though.

    Reply
  9. David Avatar
    David

    Great work Jason,
    Is there a way to get a break down by country?

    Thanks.

    Reply
  10. Adrian Avatar
    Adrian

    Would you be willing to share the list of the top 25/50/100 typed domains? 7.5m is a great dataset, so you’re teasing us with the (somewhat predicatable) tippy-top of the iceberg!

    For example, alphabetization, length and even www/non-www may be skewed in interesting/different ways at the ‘premier league’ end of the results.

    This is only based on users of Firefox. So it would also be interesting to see if there is any ‘tech’ skew to the rankings, or whether FF’s userbase is akin to IE’s – anyone know of any IE datasets?

    Reply
  11. Michael Wexler Avatar
    Michael Wexler

    Any thoughts on how “representative” this sample is of, well, anything? You are talking about the typeins of folks who chose to download this plugin to Firefox. Do the top sites visited correlate with the top sites reported by Comscore or Nielsen in the US or UK for english language settings?

    It’s interesting to just count the data, but if we want it to really mean something, you should put some descriptives around who the users are, and what they represent, as best you can (even just by using the languages and seeing how that count profiles with WW usage stats.)

    If you don’t have that data, that’s fine, but we are left with some data that tells us that some group of people we know nothing about (except that they use FF and your plugin) behave in a certain way. I’m not sure how useful that is, since it would be dangerous to generalize beyond this data without knowing more, IMHO.

    Reply
  12. expert Avatar
    expert

    Quite interesting to see the result in this way.
    I guess facebook is quite big after all.

    Reply
  13. TJ Kirchner Avatar
    TJ Kirchner

    Thats actually really interesting, that facebook takes up that much of the internet traffic and that “.com” is that dominating. Course, those numbers might be significantly different if you factor in the number of people using Chrome, mobile browsers, and apps to do their web surfing and business. Still, its pretty interesting.

    Reply
  14. Michel Avatar
    Michel

    Do you see how many people type f+enter or g+enter to go to facebook/google as the first dropdown entry in the location bar?

    Reply
  15. Jon N Avatar
    Jon N

    I hardly type google.com since I switched to Firefox and then Chrome. I don’t type m.google.com in Android. Most importantly, I seldom use facebook.
    But then, that’s just me :)

    Reply
  16. Drew Wells Avatar
    Drew Wells

    Fascinating data. Google properties combined make up 8.3%, much closer to Facebook’s typed domains share.

    Does Google’s share change significantly if you include other Google properties like News, Maps, Picasa, Blogger, Reader, Code, etc.?

    Reply
  17. Sebastian Cesar Avatar
    Sebastian Cesar

    As someone else said, many user use the google searchbar in firefox, or just write in their search in the url-field of their browser wich often is set to google. Alot of user also uses the gmail-extension to firefox and chrome. It would be interesting to see the values for these uses implemented in your statistics.

    Reply
  18. PJ Brunet Avatar
    PJ Brunet

    Nice article, your feed is going in my reader.

    PS: The Chrome ScribeFire looks like a big improvement.

    Reply
  19. John Vincent Avatar
    John Vincent

    I rarely type in an address in the address bar and only when I know that the drop down list will suggest the website that I have previous visited. Otherwise I normally use one of my tabs such as facebook, gmail, google etc. So I was wondering if there are stats for the number of people who type in the address bar as against those who search or tab their way round the web?

    Reply
  20. Christopher Finke Avatar
    Christopher Finke

    Michel: I don’t have data on how many people typed the full domain vs. how many of them typed something, pressed down one or more times, and then pressed enter. In any case, the domains were all accessed initially by someone typing in the URL bar rather than clicking on a link or a bookmark.

    Reply
  21. Drewbert Avatar
    Drewbert

    Very interesting data.

    Do you have any stats on people typing in UNICODE (IDN) gTLD’s that don’t actually exist yet (such as .ком)?

    Reply
  22. Christopher Finke Avatar
    Christopher Finke

    Drew: All of Facebook’s properties (*.facebook.com) combine for 9.4%; all of Google’s (*.google.com, YouTube, Blogspot, etc.) combine for at least 9.7%.

    Reply
  23. Christopher Finke Avatar
    Christopher Finke

    Drewbert, yes. There are a handful of entries showing people typing in Unicode, like “.ψομ”. Not a statistically significant amount, but still some.

    Reply
  24. Reg Charie - NBS-SEO Avatar
    Reg Charie – NBS-SEO

    It is interesting but perhaps not all that accurate?

    As a power user I often go to my regular round of websites by typing the first letter in the address bar and choosing the drop down.

    I often type google.com as I need to make certain that I am using one of the main datacenters and not my national, .ca.

    I often use the address bar to type in my search phrase. In Firefox this works like the Google tool bar.

    best
    Reg
    nbs-seo.com

    Reply
  25. Pankaj Garg Avatar
    Pankaj Garg

    Do you have the link stats. e.g. using google.com/bing.com where do people shift mostly?

    Reply
  26. Shoetopia Avatar
    Shoetopia

    Great data! Very interesting to read :-). That full report would be extremely interesting!

    Reply
  27. Ethan Avatar
    Ethan

    Remarkable work, Chris. Got this link from thedomains. Glad I stumbled.

    Reply
  28. Erik Avatar
    Erik

    “Drew: All of Facebook’s properties (*.facebook.com) combine for 9.4%; all of Google’s (*.google.com, YouTube, Blogspot, etc.) combine for at least 9.7%.”

    What about google.de, google.co.uk, etc? The top 10 list seems to be based on worldwide statistics, and if you’re not adding localized version of google, then the numbers really won’t be correct.

    I’d be interested in the numbers for *.facebook.* and *.google.*.

    Reply
  29. Christopher Finke Avatar
    Christopher Finke

    Erik:

    *.facebook.* = 9.4%

    *.google.* = 7.5%

    *.google.* + *.youtube.* + *.gmail.* + blogspot.* + *.googlemail.* = 12%

    Reply
  30. jeanX Avatar
    jeanX

    I’m using ff5 and have turned all my favorite sites into apps.This makes an icon of what had been a url.I google by typing in the address bar. I close everything down by clicking one ‘X’.Very interesting site…

    Reply
  31. Henry Stromkosten Avatar
    Henry Stromkosten

    Google is the typical browser start page and on the home button. so for facebook it’s better to loose type-in share because. as long as they don’t loose views or user a decreasing type-in share would mean that people use facebook as their browser starting page.

    Reply
  32. Aankhen Avatar
    Aankhen

    “(If I were more creative, I would make an infographic out of this information.)”

    FWIW, I’m glad you aren’t more creative. ;-) I’m tired of infographics where the graphics obscure the info, which, in this case, is pretty interesting stuff. It’s funny and/or tragic how no-www is winning—if only just—but most people wouldn’t know what to do if marketing materials used that version of the address.

    Reply
  33. Daniel Tan Avatar
    Daniel Tan

    Chris,
    indeed nice stats.

    Anken, regarding no-www domains winning – its quite normal IMO – who wants to type extra chars? Very many people actually type just facebook and press enter which goes to google search, then they click on first site which incidentally is facebook.com.

    Reply
  34. Derek Hauffe Avatar
    Derek Hauffe

    The Domain Alphabetization vs Frequency chart is interesting. Here’s how it compares to frequency of letter occurrence in the English language:

    http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Cryptography/Frequency_analysis

    Reply
  35. Drewbert Avatar
    Drewbert

    “Drewbert, yes. There are a handful of entries showing people typing in Unicode, like “.ψομ”. Not a statistically significant amount, but still some.”

    I guess the follow-up question would be “what’s the geographic distribution of your user base? :^)

    .ком gTLD seems to be gaining popularity in Russian and Ukraine from what I’ve seen, even though it’s yet to be approved.

    Reply
  36. Lonnie C Avatar
    Lonnie C

    Nice data and thank you for sharing. I found several stats interesting.

    There might be a sampling bias here (I’m not sure) — did you market/advertise your add-on from a facebook page? If so, then your add-on may have more traction among avid facebook users, just because they would be the ones more likely to have been exposed to your tool.

    Reply
  37. Christopher Finke Avatar
    Christopher Finke

    Lonnie: No, there’s no connection to Facebook.

    Reply
  38. Jack Avatar
    Jack

    Can you tell us about where we can register the .comj domains?

    Reply
  39. Mark A. Avatar
    Mark A.

    A lot of people and me, don’t type “http://www.” at the start of the URL as it’s quicker.
    But I have found a few sites where leaving out www. dose not work or takes you to a different page.

    On my site I have set it up so http://www.DOMAIN, web.DOMAIN and just DOMAIN all load the same page.

    Reply
  40. Adrian Avatar
    Adrian

    OK, maybe the top 100 is asking too much :) – but an aggregate of the main email provider sites would be interesting (ie Gmail + YahooMail + Hotmail etc etc).

    I also think some insight into ‘intent’ can be obtained this way:
    “I am about to be social” = FB + Twitter + similar
    “I am about to search” = Google + Bing (but excluding non-search properties) etc
    “I am about to use email”

    Thanks!

    Reply
  41. Javier Avatar
    Javier

    You mention .co as a typo for .com, yet .co is the country level TLD for Colombia. Does your add-on and/or your statistics consider this?

    Reply
  42. Christopher Finke Avatar
    Christopher Finke

    Javier: That’s actually “.co,”, where people type a comma instead of an “m”. I took into consideration that .co is a valid TLD.

    Reply
  43. karl Avatar
    karl

    Not sure you are collecting these information, but if you have location of people… you can distribute the domain by location. It might give a very different picture. On top of that a discrimination on the time the data has been accessed once normalized for timezone might also give an interesting picture on when people are accessing each type of Web sites.

    Reply
  44. Karl Mikkelsen Avatar
    Karl Mikkelsen

    I suspect that people also have google as their home page, much like myself. This would account for a significant drop in the number of times you need to type it in!

    This also doesn’t take into account chrome where the address bar is the google search bar!

    Reply
  45. CoreAn_Crack3rZ Avatar
    CoreAn_Crack3rZ

    Great article dude, where did you get all those statistics by the way?

    Reply
  46. Aankhen Avatar
    Aankhen

    Daniel Tan: I know it’s not surprising. What I was saying is that despite people primarily using the www-less versions of URIs to get there, they wouldn’t understand what to do if the marketing materials used those URIs (e.g. Web: chrisfinke.com).

    Reply
  47. John N. Avatar
    John N.

    Can you make the full data set available either online or for purchase? I’d love to have a list of all the domains and number of times they were typed in during the 6 month period.

    Reply
  48. Christopher Finke Avatar
    Christopher Finke

    John – I’ll contact you privately about access to the full data set.

    If anyone else is interested, email me directly at chris@efinke.com.

    Reply
  49. Anon Avatar
    Anon

    Someone already eluded to this but the fact that facebook is typed more than google isn’t really that meaningful. Google’s usage comes from typing searches into the url bar and search bar in most modern browsers.

    Reply
  50. Donna McMaster Avatar
    Donna McMaster

    I have to agree with Michael Wexler … this data is interesting but does not represent a very wide group of users. What percentage of web users actually installed this plugin and what characteristics do they share? Because they are the only ones actually represented by the data.

    Reply
  51. Matej Latin Avatar
    Matej Latin

    great article… i use the search bar in firefox which is actually google.. and I think a lot of people use it… maybe google should be around 5%…

    Reply
  52. Sebastian Gräßl Avatar
    Sebastian Gräßl

    I think a more interesting topic would be how many people use Google, the site and the Search-boxes in browsers, to get to their frequently visited sites.
    A lot of people i know don’t actually use the address bar to get to facebook.com. They go to google, type facebook and klick on the first hit.

    Reply
  53. Christopher Finke Avatar
    Christopher Finke

    For anyone who’s interested, I’ve launched a site that gives more extensive access to the data and trends: http://typed.it/

    Reply
  54. Schild Avatar
    Schild

    Most of my colleagues use google as home. And they don´t realize there exists a address bar. They google anything…

    Reply
  55. Rob Russo Avatar
    Rob Russo

    Nice info. I wonder how long it will take Google+ to crack the Top 10 — or will this just enhance the already popular google.com?

    Reply
  56. macam manfaat makanan untuk penderita hipertensi Avatar
    macam manfaat makanan untuk penderita hipertensi

    This is really amazing, an article that gives motivation to all and is really useful. This is the first web that I have good value because the content of this article I think is very qualified that can amaze me with the contents of this article you create, I am very grateful to you for helping me find new ideas.
    We always wait for your next article and do not forget to visit also our articledo not forget to read more information …
    http://obathipertensialami.walatragamatkapsul.com/macam-macam-manfaat-makanan-untuk-penurun-darah-tinggi-yang-mudah-didapat-disekitar-anda/

    Reply
  57. Avatar
    Anonymous

    Hi,

    Your link doesn’t seem to work anymore ( http://typed.it), can you rehost the information somewhere else?

    Reply
    1. Christopher Finke Avatar
      Christopher Finke

      typed.it was also sold to Eyeo GmbH with URL Fixer. You’ll need to contact them for the information.

      Reply
  58. ISHAAN KHAPERDE Avatar
    ISHAAN KHAPERDE

    I’d just like to interject that faceboook.com now directs to the actual Facebook in 2024 😂😂😂.

    Reply

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

Google+