I talk to a lot of real estate professionals about websites.  During those discussions, I very often want to show the person an example of something on a client’s real estate website.

Sounds simple, but it gets quite complicated if the person I’m talking to doesn’t know the fastest way to use a search engine.  So, for all of you who haven’t had the time to analyze search engine pages, here’s a tip for speeding up your use of the Internet.

Shown below is a screenshot of a Yahoo page.  You’ll notice that there are two places identified on the page.  One is the Address Line and the other is the Search Box.

If you know the domain name for a website you want to visit, the fastest way to get there is to type the domain name in the Address Line.  If you’ve typed it correctly, you will land directly on that website.

The Search Box is meant to help you search for something on the Internet.  For example, if you want to see all the websites that contain information about “Atlanta real estate”, type that phrase into the Search Box.  The search engine will display their results page and you can choose the website you want to visit.

The problem I run into is that there are lots of people who don’t use the Address Line at all. 

They type everything into the Search Box.  If they want to visit BuildRealEstateResults.com, they type that phrase into the search box.  For a well established website, that’s not such a problem.

But, you do have to go through the extra step of getting the results page, then clicking on the result you want.  It just takes more time than you need to spend.

The real problem comes in when you want to visit a new website.  If the search engines haven’t added the new website to their index, when you type the domain name in the Search Box, you get. . .  nothing!

It’s a little thing, but it can be a time saver!