When I said "duplicate", I meant that both the number and the title are in themselves sufficient to locate the article. I get the renaming scenario, but I thin

When I said "duplicate", I meant that both the number and the title are in themselves sufficient to locate the article. I get the renaming scenario, but I think it is an edge case. Most duplication can be avoided by appending date or user name to the title if there is already a similar title in the database. /questions/foo_bar-by_mherkender /questions/foo_bar-2001-01-01 At least this way unique URLs will be short(er) and more memorable. Overall, though, I think you overestimate the usefulness of named URLs, because you concentrate on specific cases like people linking to something bad on YouTube (that still has an appropriate title) without giving coherent description. There are other cases too. A lot of them. They just aren't as annoying/memorable. http://stackoverflow.com/questions/22883751/this-is-not-so-helpful-is-it http://stackoverflow.com/questions/22883751/this-is-not-so-h...? I read a small magazine about PC games, and I recall using ID jumping for navigation a lot. When the numbers are below 1000, it is easier to remember and type "article=234" than "/article/Does+Assassin's+creed+break+new+ground?". Also, I sincerely think that the trend for named URLs has more to do with Google that what users want or like. If Google liked super-long URLs with lots of punctuation, most websites would do just that and people would find ways to rationalize the trend. This doesn't automaticall mean title URLs are wrong, but it's somewhat different from "everyone like them".