A lot of us in the United States that don’t travel much like to think we are the biggest, the first, the best. Well that often isn’t the case. A good example is an advertising trend Cabel Sasser noticed in a recent trip to Japan.

Within minutes of riding on the first trains in Japan, I notice a significant change in advertising, from train to television. The trend? No more printed URL’s. The replacement? Search boxes with recommended search terms!

As Cabel notes this actually makes a lot of sense. If you’ve tried to buy a domian anytime in the last decade or so anything remotely meaningful (and short) just doesn’t exist. And when you add in a couple slashs and a .tv extension a lot of folks will just never get to your site. So enter these type of ads, where the search term is what you need to recall to locate their site. Pretty freaking smart if you ask me.