Hitwise have released some data which quantifies something that I’ve thought for quite a while: for many people Google has now replaced the address bar as the primary way of navigating the web, even when they know the address they wish to get to.

Hitwise’s stats suggest that in May of this year:

88% of searches for the top 2,000 search terms in the UK were branded in nature, up from 81% in 2007 and 66% in 2005.

and whilst it’s a very high percentage, the more I think about the less surprised I am. On a daily basis I see very literate web users typing the name of a brand or website into Google when they want to reach the site in question, even when the web address is utterly obvious, or one that they surely know.Howver there may be another factor in play and one which I’m guilty of: if you use Firefox (which more & more of us do) then the address bar actually performs Google searches for you: try typing face into the Firefox address bar if you don’t believe me. This has now become my default method of browsing and I wonder how many others share my habits.

Hitwise also go on to list the most searched for brands and whilst they may be struggling to work out how to make enough money to justify their valuations, as far as British internet users are concerned it seems that the social networks are still the place to be, with Facebook, bebo, YouTube & MySpace all featuring in the top 10.

So what does any of this mean for brands that don’t feature in this list? Well, for a start it suggest that, if you can prove an ROI, bidding on your competitors’ brand names may be something that you should really be considering (even if it’s a method we don’t necessarily agree with - at the end of the day business is business.)

Admittedly Google’s quality score often makes it difficult to keep the CPC at a level where it’s worth doing but if I were competing with Amazon, eBay or Argos (all listed in the top 10) I’d be investing in research to prove why my service was better than theirs and then creating content detailing this and using these as landing pages for ads on searches against these brand names.

It also shows how vitally important it is to make sure that you are optimised for your brand name. This may sound utterly facile, but I’m regularly astounded by brands that don’t rank for their own name. This often happens when companies decide to re-brand and come up with a new name that is also used by companies in a million other sectors or which has a plethora of different meanings. And this is an especially dangerous move to make as re-branding often also involves changing domains, which brings with it all the pain of Google’s Sandbox, which I’ve seen in action far too many times, no matter how much some people deny its existence.

The one thing that really disappoints me about this data is that it doesn’t back-up the old story that suggested that the most popular search term on Google was Yahoo, and vice versa.

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