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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."
Never underestimate the appeal of a nice email-address. You don't want to print a google search url onto your business card, do you?
I have a feeling awesomesearchenginefortheinternet.com wouldn't do very well, know matter how good the underlying technology.
At some point maybe you could just do away with domain names themselves... As long as you can get to the search engine, you just pull up raw IP links. It would sure make the Internet safer without all those DNS vulnerabilities.
...but it will be slowed down considerably. There will always be a market for domain names that are nouns. Some people just don't know any better than to put what they're looking for in their address bar. I am continually amazed by the number of ordinary (read: AOL) net users who haven't heard of Google yet. Every time I find one, I change their home page.
I hope this convinces some people that competition beats regulation, at least most of the time.
I wouldn't say Google is part of fixing the problem; search engines before Google could have just done the same. But now that Google is pretty much the only search engine in town, and that people tend to stick to whatever their default portal advertizes to them, the trend in the article is only natural, and really shouldn't be associated with Google directly.
"Pinky, you've left the lens cap of your mind on again." - P&TB
"I can see my house from here!" - ST:
I say good riddance. I'll keep an eye out now for the few domains that I was interested in back then. But I still wont pay a squatter. Not one cent. If I dont use google to search for my desired name once in awhile, maybe I'll try the Verisign Waiting List Service also discussed quite recently, so long as I can get my money back if I get tired of waiting.
In general, I think this is a good thing. It seems that demand for and profitability of the service that lives on the domain name is just as important as the domain itself. What a surprise.
Actually, if I know what page I'm looking for (ie, I've been there), Google is 98% successful with my searches. The Via Technologies example is a very good one. There are lots of other (mostly asian technology ;) companies that don't have the benifit of www.theirname.com domains, and Google will get me the right page on "theirname homepage" almost every time.
/what/ you're looking for (ie, you know what you want, but not where it is), obviously, Google is not going to be as effective in this case, since you probably don't know a unique set of words appearing on the page on which you'll eventually find what you want (or maybe it doesn't exist!)
/I/ need, although I realize there are some other kick ass search engines out there too.
Obviously, if you don't know
Also, I think the "google" effect is more of a Kleenex thing (where a brand name becomes a common slang for the generalized technology) than it is credit, although I also use opera and have configured it such that I only have the google search box on my toolbar. Google's all
"Old man yells at systemd"
This is interesting, and very true. For a long time, I have just used Google to search for a web page instead of trying to make a guess. Often, the closest guess are wrong. Even some less experienced computer users, like my parents, use a search engine, and almost never type in an address.
That's nice and all, but what happens when Google (and the other 1 or 2 decent search engines that will exist) stop being free?
It seems to me that the current trend in internet marketing is to offer a great product free of charge for a few months, then slowly tighten the screws. Take a look at Hotmail, for example. A few months ago they started pushing their Pay Upgrade more and more. Then they started slicing off quota space (down to 2.5 now) and lowering the window for you to login before they kill your account. In fact just today I got an email from them informing me that I must now login once every 30 days or my account will lose all emails and contact lists.
Unless I opt for the $19.95 Paid Upgrade of course...
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Google is one of the greatest tools on the internet. I use it all the time to look for work on my thesis, commercial sites, phone books, order flowers, buy laptops, books, etc.
But to say that Google is the reason whu you don't give so much importance to domain names is a bit too strong. I think the mature age of the www and the bad shape economy are greater factors of the less importante domain name factor. You don't see so many fight around domain names because people have major concerns about other survival things.
------I can please only one person per day. Today is not your day. Tomorrow isn't looking good either.------
No matter which way this comes out, the professional namers will get new business. (These are the people who come up with names for vehicles such as Isuzu Axiom and new corporate identities like Verizon.)
Memorable domain names and searchable business names both need these characteristics:
- Short, or few elements
- Unique
- Memorable in itself, and,
-- easy to associate with your product
-- and just your product, not everybody's
- Pronounceable on sight and spellable from memory
- Without ribald connotations in major languages
An excellent example: Slashdot.
Ordinary business people are no better at making up names than they are at drawing their own logos. If you can do it for them, you've got a niche.
I think it's a bit difficult to discount the current economy's role in the decrease in spending on random domain names. Google may play a role in this trend, but I'd guess that a lot of squatters have run out of cash to spend on wild speculation.
goats.com: better than
what happens when search engines start mixing paid links with "normal" search results?
...i'd rather type out the url myself, i think.
already many popular sites do this without so much as an indicator to help the searcher. so while google and other search engines ^may^ have taken care of the cybersquatters, it wont be long that marketers of the world run to exploit this usage pattern....
it's been clearly shown that such trivialities as domain names (among other things internet-related) are of dubious real value.
.com unless you are a legitimate business, no generic words, and so on.
Even on the internet, domain names were never important. Think about it, who is the best-known web-based book retailer, bookstore.com or Amazon? The biggest ISP isn't isp.com, it's AOL or MSN. Even Google or Yahoo, not search.com.
I blame NSI et al - they should have been a lot more rigorous with registrations, as the NICs in some other countries are - no registering of
I would like to see domain names publicized as they are, and by IP and by bar code, but for them to also carry other information, such as the company name and description. Then people carry a pen-like or card-like device to grab URLs off of everything (a can of baked beans, back of a cereal box, off a business card, in a newspaper, etc.) to take back to your computer later to load the appropriate page. Nothing proprietary like that CueCat crap. A real standard and simple technology to make addresses easily accessible.
They need to be ubiquitous.
Might the shrinkage in number of websites have something to do with the corporate assimilation of the web?
As anyone who's been here from the start can testify, things have changed substantially since the early days. First there just wasn't much out there, and what there was was pretty random. Then Yahoo and other search/gateway sites began to come along just as the first boom of sites hit, making things a bit more organized and predictable. Soon after this, the corporations began to make their presence known, and then they started to take over.
Now if you want information on a topic you go to a corporate website that specializes in providing that information along with lots of other info, banner adds, pop-up adds, redirects to partner sites, etc. ad nauseum.
Old sites are lapsing because their place has been usurped by profit-driven sites. Times may have been hard for the tech industry lately, but who's going to go offline first: the business paying $1000 per month in hosting fees or the unemployed tech worker who's paying similar fees for his personal domain.
There's also the rise of the umbrella site that hosts a number of smaller sites under a single domain so that Jim's tech page is no longer at www.jimstechpage.net, but is now found under www.acmeweb.com/jimstechpage/.
Not all of this is bad, not all of it is good. The times they are a changin', and if we don't want to be caught unawares, we should keep our eyes open to the way its changing instead of sticking with an utopian vision that went bye-bye 5 years ago.
The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing.
Must work for MS [joke]
OTOH, alot of search engines use as part of their results inputs from places like Open Directory, and others. The results are going to be uniform in many places. the end result is some sort of consolidation of resources.
Yahoo got started by a couple of college kids building the first big bookmark list into something useful. There would be a distinctly different flavor if this had originated in ussr or china or something.
"It is a greater offense to steal men's labor, than their clothes"
When finding stuff, we basically use one or both of two basic methods: Directories and indices.
DNS is, basically, a directory. So was the original Yahoo. Google is an index.
The difference is, that with a directory, an external categorization is applied to predefined entities (such as websites). With an index, the "categorization" is derived from the content itself.
Of course, deep down below, at the core of "finding stuff"-logic, directories and indices are the same. Google, too, operates with externally defined entities: words and pages.
The ultimate searchengine, one that would REALLY kill the need for DNS in day-to-day surfing, would somehow combine these two notions, and possibly include many more.
For the sufficiently clueless, even trivial applications of common sense are indistinguishable from wisdom
Expect to see more articles along the lines of "Google saved my life/company/favorite pet/etc"
As others have pointed out, after the IPO Google will become a subscription service.
Every time, and I do mean every time, I refer a friend to Google two things happen.
Google needs to improve their usability testing because they have a long way to go. They're coasting right now because the interface is simple, so the annoyances are less noticeable.
Googles' ranking criteria can be duplicated. It's the finer details of site design that no one has gotten quite right yet.
Two things seem apparent to me:
1) Most knowledgeably computer users aren't typing in "http://www.tires.com" to find a place to buy tires
2) Most new Internet users aren't typing in "http://www.google.com" to find what they are looking for
Until the Internet population becomes more educated, there will always be a benefit to domain name speculation.
I doubt anyone that uses Slashdot types in words as a domain name to find what they are looking for (unless they are bored or desparate). On the other hand, Mr. Billy-Bob Joe from the midwest who is using the Internet for the first time doesn't quite know what he is doing, so he will try to do just that, likely.
In other words, Tom's Hardware would have absolutely no benefit to domain spculation, but another company more oriented to older, less experienced Internet users would continue to have success.
A Domain Name is the name of a BOX, a piece of hardware, an address. Just because it's more friendly to humans than an IP address, doesn't mean that it's the best way to get a WEB user to the right place. Having companies jump through hoops to 0wn "ibm.com" "ibm.edu" "ibm.org" "ibm.net" "ibmsucks.com" "international_business_machines.com" "international_business_machines.org" etc. ad infinitum makes NO fucking sense at all. Just as it makes no sense for some guy named John to get his "john.com" domain legally removed from his posession, because the international brotherhood of guys looking for prostitutes comes along a year later and decides they want a website.
.org, .com, or .edu. (not that anybody follows those rules anymore).
If I want to find Apple Computer's website, I should have a place on my browser where I can enter text: "Apple Computer" and get www.apple.com. And if I want Apple Records, I type in "Apple Records". If I type in "Apple" it gives me a choice, plus all the Apple advocacy and rumors sites, and both Apple Computer and Apple Records should be satisfied with that.
I, as the Joe Sixpack user of the net shouldn't have to know if the correct address is "www.apple.com" "www.applecomputer.com" or "www.apple_computer.com". Relying on these weird domain name permutations will often get you the WRONG site!
For you and I, the average clueful slashdot user, domain names are a fine way to find where you want to go - but even WE rely on bookmarks, favorites and shortcuts for many of our favorite sites. The typing of actual DNS names should be the resort of the technical though - and my mother should not have to know what an underscore is, or why a site should be a
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Believe it or not back in the day when Yahoo! was king this is exactly how they operated. They had tons of people submitting links and then a Yahoo! staffer would review the content of the page place the link in the correct category and add meta-data to thier database.
When Yahoo! was the only game in town it seemed to contain all the internet. Then along came the crawlers which were not as accurate but a whole lot faster than 1000 monkeys at 1000 terminals. For while however Yahoo was still more accurate at finding what you wished. Then scripting got better, someone came up with a better algorithm and out comes the likes of Lycos and AltaVista.
Yahoo! still has staffers review sites. When you do a Yahoo search it is normally split into 2 parts (1) the Yahoo! search results (human checked and entered) and (2) whoever their crawler of the month is (used to be AltaVista now is Google).
There are many problems with a human reviewed system though. The main one being that you could never have enough staff to keep up with the growth of the internet and still have a profitable business. Also once you enter a link you can't forget about it you have to have a process in which you go back and re-check old links to assure the categorization and the actual link are correct. Now that you have some of your staff reviewing old links you have an even harder time keeping up with the new stuff. Thus why some Yahoo! links haven't been changed in about 5 years.
For more information on the logistics of this kind of thing I suggest you look at some of the commercial products out there that do this. There is a whole industry that deals with this and not just for the Internet. Some of them are:
Content Managment Systems:
Plumtree
Interwoven
Viginette
LiveLink
"Don't mess with him, he taunts the happy fun ball."
To say "Google search term blah blah" is not that different.
Of course, this doesn't address the fluidity of Google. "blah blah" might work today, but not tomorrow.
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