URLs generally do not matter to people. Quick, what’s the URL of this discussion? Will you remember it? Does that have any impact on your usage of HN? The vas

URLs generally do not matter to people. Quick, what’s the URL of this discussion? Will you remember it? Does that have any impact on your usage of HN? The vast, vast majority of website sessions start with a click. When people bother to type things in, they type them into search bars (reminder that in most browsers, the “address bar” is also the search bar). So be clear what you want from your URL structure. If you want search traffic, you’d do better to organize it for Google (hierarchical topic-based) than making it short. If you want to be able to say it or print it for easy typing, a domain name is going to be best. Catch it and redirect it to the target page. Even “domain.com/word” is going to be hard for most people to remember. If they remember it at all, they will probably type in “domain word” and let Google figure it out for them.