The search term “Yahoo” more popular than “sex” in Google? According to Google Trends, it is.
The Daily Domainer analyzes the story behind this strange phenomenon. Browser users have apparently gotten used to typing the name of the domain rather than the full domain name with the .com when trying to access popular sites such as Yahoo, MySpace, Amazon and Ebay. Besides the typing of names into the address bar, people use their installed toolbars like Google/Yahoo toolbar in the same manner. This is attributed, no doubt, to Google’s search relevancy based on inbound links to a site helps authority sites like these rank at the top saving the time needed to sort through listings. Only branded domain names will generate any significant amount of traffic from a domain name.
The other spectrum of valuable domain names are from generic domain names. People have a tendency to entire generic names plus the .com extension, examples being candy.com and cellphones.com.
Domainer concludes:
In summary, we can observe two opposite trends: People who “should” type domains into their address bar end up typing them into their search bar or search engine. And people who “should” use search engines to find what they’re looking for, make up domains on the fly and type them into their address bar. You could call it the Battle of the Clueless. And the battle has only just begun.
The value of type-in traffic is strong as indicated by the rising sale prices of premium domain names. You can find a nice list of weekly domain sales and yearly domain sale summaries at DNJournal.com.