Firefox 3 - the solution to trademark bidding on Google?

Firefox 3 is now in its first Release Candidate version prior to full public release and I'm still very impressed by its 'awesome bar' functionality - which lets you use the browser location bar to search through your web history.

As I have previously blogged, that could threaten the surprisingly high proportion of branded search traffic through search engines which represents repeat visits to sites - almost 37% of all search traffic according to research last year from Atlas.

But Atlas also reports that 22% of traffic via search engines is first-time visits to sites from branded searches - people searching for 'dell' or 'dell.com'.  I think it would be quite simple to offer a version of Firefox with a database of brands and URLs pre-populated into its SQL Lite database.

That way, a search for 'tesco insurance' would create a dropdown like this...

I populated the database in this instance by browsing through to the relevant sites.

I'd say that this is easier for the user than bothering to do a search for the brand - and is clearly better for the brands who would no longer need to pay a handful of pence to Google for each click on a trademarked search term.