We all check multiple websites for the same information be it sports, finance, or entertainment. Some of us use more than one web based email service.
These are sites that we visit often, so they are usualy found in our browser history. To make things quick I used to just start typing mail or sports and let the browser history auto complete bring up the domain. Lately I have been noticing that that isn't working as well.
Why?
In the case of sports, one site is an acronym and the other is sportswidgets.com. The acronym site has started using a sports.acronym.com subdomain to run its stories under so when I want to visit sportswidget.com and type sports in my browser bar, the history returns all the sports.acronym.com pages first burying sportswidget.com way down in the history list.
In the case of mail, the site that alphabetically comes first uses ajax while the other site does not. This means that when I type mail into the browser wanting to go to the other site, my browser history first returns all these nonsense URLs from the first mail service.
In the sports case, I think the sports.acronym.com subdomain is intentional. Designed to make you see and remember their domain before their competitor's comes up. In the mail case, I think its just a happy convergence of IE requiring random URLs to run ajax requests through and a name that comes alphabetically before a competitor.
Either way it asserts the primacy of that domain over its competitor.
If you have not noticed this before, pay attention to it. Its a subtle way to reinforce one brand over another, and you will probably be seeing a lot more of it in the future.
The dark side is calling.
