Search Engines. Feed Readers. Digg. Stumble Upon. Social Bookmarking sites. Start pages. Link Love. Referrals. Trackbacks. Pingbacks and more.

Ok I am not talking gibberish :). What I was highlighting is that these are many of the ways readers land up on your site. But what about the age old method of typing in your URL into the address bar. It has almost been long forgotten and very rarely do users use this option.

The plain Jane address bar is the most convenient yet rarely use option for a user to visit your site. Have you ever seen more than 50% of your readers coming in using the address bar. I doubt that many of you would have seen this.

But why is this happening?

To call it an information overload would be an understatement. Over the past few years websites have sprung up like anything and all in different niches. Technorati is tracking more than 10 million blogs. Feed burner is feeding around 3 quarters of a million feeds.

Now those are just blogs or those who have registered to them. And there are more than 80 million websites today. So that’s more than information overload.

I remember the good old days when I had started using Internet around 9 years ago, the only two sites I knew were Yahoo Mail and Yahoo Chat.

Comparing that to today

• Have searched and visited more than 100 sites today out of which I bookmarked 13 without looking at the url.
• I have subscribed to around 450 feeds.
• I currently have 900 bookmarks in stored in Google.
• Have backed up around 2150 bookmarks to backup location last year.
• Have dugg posts I have found interesting.
• Have Stumbled and saved sites.

Overall I am too lazy to do it the good old way and use the address bar, because it would never be possible for me to remember all that information and type in URL’s at the address bar. All these just tell me that RIP addressbar in few years you will disappear from browsers.

How often do you type in the URL   to a site? Do let me know and share your opinions I am all link love and have removed the nofollow from the comments too.

BTW if you still use the address bar you would like to know the shortcuts to load url’s faster and easier.