The Google Effect And Domain Name Speculation

A reader writes "Google brought us the age of high quality searches, and with that may come the end of domain-name speculation. Good thing we paid for all those laws to punish cyber-squatters. Read the article and learn more."

Comments

Wait just a dad-burn minute

[Uttles]

The most interesting from a domain-name point of view is this: With the rise of search tools that unerringly bring you to the page you want, the need for a highly specific domain name -- one that a casual Web user would be able to guess -- has practically disappeared.

I agree with this article for the most part; Google is a great search engine and it eliminates the need to memorize a bunch of URL's. There's a few assumptions the author is making that aren't exactly correct.

1 - Google doesn't "unerringly bring you the page you want" because no matter what you type into the search field, it can't tell exactly what you're looking for. It gives great results most of the time, but it still stumbles once you move into more vague searches. This isn't Google's fault, it's just the fact of life that neither people or computers are psychic, we can't read each other's minds.

2 - Having a domain name that someone could guess, or that someone might not even know relates to your company, is still pretty desirable. People are familiar with having a .com after most websites, so if you put up toys.com, you'll probably get a lot of hits, no matter what your actual company is. I agree, typing in www.lucenttechnologies.com is a much worse method than going to Google and looking up "Lucent Technologies," but I think people have always preferred search engines for looking up specific companies.

3 - This is probably the most important point: domain names are about advertising in today's internet economy. The companies would like for people to be able to guess their website address, but what's more important to them is that customers can easily remember the address when they see it in advertisements. So, when you see a commercial for Nike Shoes, and they show you www.nikeshoes.com, you will easily remember that for the next time you're browsing the web. Now, it really wouldn't make a difference if it was www.nike.com, www.shoesbynike.com, www.gonike.com, or www.swoosh.com, because the point is they're giving you an easy to remember location. Now, if they gave you www.commercialwebsites.com/shoecompanies/nike/shoe s.html, it probably wouldn't stick in your mind very long, and you wouldn't just causally browse the site. Now, don't get me wrong, if that was the URL and you REALLY wanted to check out Nike, then you'd go look it up on Google, and you'd get there anyway. The point I'm trying to make is that it's not about the companies trying to guess what domain you'll type in, they're trying to make it easy for you to associate a website to their company, and that's why I think there's still a big demand for specific domain names.