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July 8, 2009

| Quiver for Brushes >>

That Magic Threshold

I have a question.

Per Farhad Manjoo, domains are for suckers. That goes both for buying them and keeping track of them. Why bother remembering talkingpointsmemo.com when I can just type “josh marshall” or “tpm” into the address bar in Firefox or Chrome (not Safari, though) and jump directly to the site?

Here’s the question: Talking Points Memo is the first Google result for both “josh marshall” and “tpm”—that’s how those browsers know to take me there straightaway. However, robinsloan.com is the first result for “robin sloan”… but I do not get the boom-tube treatment. So what’s the missing piece? Do you need a certain number of links backing you up to activate the shortcut? A certain number of queries per day? Any ideas?

More examples: “nick kristof” takes me straight to Kristof’s NYT topic page. “matt thompson” takes me to the Google results page. “farhad manjoo” takes me to Manjoo’s Wikipedia entry. “jason kottke” takes me straight to kottke.org. “epic 2014” takes me straight to EPIC 2014. “tim carmody” takes me to Google results. Argh! Are we really that obscure?

Robin-sig.gif
Posted July 8, 2009 at 3:41 | Comments (5) | Permasnark
File under: Briefly Noted

Comments

Typing "Robin Sloan" without the quote marks into Firefox's address bar takes me to robinsloan.com automatically.

So, no, as it turns out you're not that obscure.

(Nor famous enough to have an exception to the way Firefox and Google work created especially for your name.)

Posted by: Matt on July 8, 2009 at 04:16 PM

Oh. Ha. Hmm. I think it doesn't work for Snarkmarket authors b/c I monkeyed w/ the search results for Snarkmarket using Google's "SearchWiki." So it feels like it ought to show me those instead.

I feel silly. Almost silly enough to delete this post. Almost.

For me, "Tim Carmody" goes to search results. Timothy Carmody goes to the profile page of a UCSF psychiatry professor.

I tell you this, Dr Timothy Carmody: I am coming for you.

My arch nemesis strikes again! Andrew Fitzgerald with and without quotes goes to the scout profile of OU baller Andrew Fitzgerald!

I can't get Chrome to go anywhere other than search results when I type a non-URL into the Address bar. That's one of the reasons I don't like Chrome very much - Firefox does a better job at using Google's "I'm Feeling Lucky" than Google's own browser.

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