Dewey Decimal Online?

At the risk of sounding old and obviously out of fashion, I have to wonder -- has the online space grown too quickly and thus still a version of the wild west?

It struck me last night as I was watching Bravo's the Fashion Show (FYI-- horrible, horrible show I can't stop watching) last night that there is no consistency to marketing URLs. One insurance company is driving to YouTube.com/something something, one company is driving to their Facebook page and many more have varying names-- everything from catchy to predictable. Marketers throw anything and everything at potential customers to get them engaged with our online selves, but are we just making it harder than it needs to be for consumers?

When we know that a significant % of users go straight to a search engine because they don't remember the URL or are just most comfortable starting their research there, are we ignoring the pink elephant in the room?

Special K and a couple of other products have seemingly tried this, and while I've seen their campaigns nominated for awards, I haven't heard them referred to as the gold standard either.

It makes me wonder, what would the world be like if the Dewey Decimal System was in place for online? If companies in mass decided to have a systematically standard URL? For instance, all TV stations-- WSB.TV, ABC.TV, all companies with known names and branches -- hyatt.com/123peachtree, nissan.com/456main?

I know, I know, it's a gross generalization, and consumers are already accustomed to using search engines to start their research, but aren't we feeding traffic to search engines where the competition can steal the consumer in the first place? And aren't we paying thousands of extra dollars (through SEM and SEO) just to make sure we're capturing the fish we threw into the net in the first place? Something seems out of whack here to me and maybe it can't be fixed, but maybe juuuuust maybe... we can improve the way we market URLs just a bit.

I don't have the magical fix, but these are the sort of things I think about as we're stewarding our Client's online efforts.