Just search in Katakana
UPDATE 4JUL2010: The ICANN board has now approved Chinese character URLs. I doubt this will change the marketing strategies for Japanese companies, however. I think we’ll just get a bunch of redirects.
Americans invented the Internet, and it’s going to stay nice and readable to Americans as long as they have anything to say about it (daggumit). Most people in the Americas, Western Europe, and Australia are blithely unaware that a battle has been raging for several years among the internationalists over the format of the URL (the web address you type to go somewhere on the web). Why? Because these countries all use the roman alphabet. Our slavic friends would love to use cyrillic URLs; Chinese want Chinese characters, Koreans want hangul, etc. The ICANN (the international standards cops) are still only testing and allowing non-roman alphabets in limited trials.
Last month in Tokyo, I noticed something about all the adverts on the trains: the Japanese companies have found a way around the common restriction: they simply tell you (the customer) what to search for, using Japanese kanji and gana, nevermind what the actual proper URL may be. I’ve highlighted two examples here (forgive the low photo quality– lighting on subways isn’t so bright).
On the good side, by asking the commuter to search for a specific keyword, they’ve immediately screened out all the content from the English-language Internet (which can be overbearing in volume). Every mobile phone has this rudimentary web search capability, so the call-to-action is immediate.
Solar backpacks-- just search for
On the bad side, however, this strategy assumes some risk: if I ask for my customers to find me by searching for “スマート外国人” (smart gaijin), what happens when someone else comes along with a better SEO value for that term? All my advertising now goes to benefit someone else.
Mitigating this risk are three factors: 1) campaigns on the trains cycle pretty quickly, so keyword hints can be updated often; 2) the keywords are pretty specific, and the campaigns only bring more traffic, which then reinforces the lead position; 3) Rakuten has an almost monopoly-level stranglehold on web publishing in Japan. If two companies conflict over a desired keyword, Rakuten can probably work it out between them (ah, the Japanese sense of controlharmony). It’s kinda like when AOL or Yahoo could get away with this back in the day.
I promise I'm relevant 
Its a natural progression, as the web internationalizes fully, the dominance of roman characters will fall. That is a nice trick though, its almost like a hash tag in print advertising to generate a unique ID to correlate search ads on, rather than a specific characteristic of the product. It seems like this would be most effective on established brands, and it would likely cause a conflict with new products, if the ad worked well, the hash tag becomes the brand, should you change the hash tag, or someone else pick it up, you are back at square one.
Hopefully the migration from the roman character monopoly will have the knock-on effect of getting a thorough redesign of DNS done. I long for a future where infinite character sets are allowed and pakistan can decide to block youtube without ruining it for the rest of us. And crypto would be nice, but thats probably a stretch.
That’s pretty interesting, and is a sensible solution to the problem of Roman-only URLs.
Do you think the marketers are likely to switch to URLs instead of search terms even if the TLDs are still Roman, like .co.jp? Or are they likely to wait till full non-Roman TLDs are available?
Jon,
I think URLs will be non-roman within a couple of years– the marketing pressure to line it up with the real name of the company is too strong.
Kirk– I also agree that the DNS, and the bass-ackwards notation of sub.domain.tld.country needs a serious re-think. Unfortunately, I also think that this re-think will come with Internet2 and IP6, whenever those get here (just in time to play some DukeNukem Forever, maybe?).
Japanese language URLs exist and are supported in Japan under the .jp and .com domains (try going to ). There are five reasons why ads show search term queries (in order of importance):
#1. Inputing English and especially symbols such as slash (“/”), colon (“:”) is difficult on a ten-key (non-QWERTY) phone, which is still the most preferred input hardware for Asian mobile phones. For example, in a worse case scenario on a handset I won’t mention, it takes 31 key presses to input the url . To input “グーグル” takes 14 worse case, but probably less due to auto-completion. (If you ever wondered why people search for “google” on Google, this is why: ironically, it’s easier to get to “google.com” by _searching_ for it than inputing the URL directly).
#2. Firing up the search widget on a typical Japanese mobile phone is a one (short or long) button press, at most two. Firing up the manual URL input function is usually a few more keystrokes and buried in a sub-menu (many people don’t even know how to input a URL on their phone even though they use the browser!).
#3. It’s easier to stay at the top of search than you think; in addition to SEOs, you can buy (heaven forbid!) ads linked to keywords, which a professional company that is putting an ad out is going to do. Also, mobile phones often have a walled-garden search and ads, and getting exclusive rights to a keyword in special sections, etc., is easier than general search.
#4. Punycode (used for non-ASCII domain names) support and/or non-English URL support is sketchy and sometimes non-existent in older browsers and especially older and more primitive mobile phones, and sometimes only partially supported (i.e. it will accept the URL in non-English, but will immediately convert it into the unreadable/too-long )
#5. Putting QR codes on train adverts (though they exist) is frowned upon because the appearance of taking photos with your camera on a crowded train is bad manners (some phones in Japan will make a shutter sound* even when in QR-code reader mode and your phone is muted, so it’s harder to get a QR code covertly than you think)
* The iPhone and Android-based phones sold in Japan are specially modified to make a shutter sound even when muted.
Brilliant. I knew there would be someone out there smarter than me to clear this up. Arigatou, Inoue-san.
[...] Input tools – Twitter seems tailor made for mobile devices: short, text-centric, quick input. For a networked society that already preferred the mobile phone-based Internet access, twitter drops right into place, often much handier than email. I’ve discussed this before. [...]