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

I think Google is getting a little too much credit

[HEbGb]

I mean, "the Google effect"?

I think the most likely cause of the shrinking market for domain names is simply the internet bubble bursting - it's been clearly shown that such trivialities as domain names (among other things internet-related) are of dubious real value.
And as for Google searching, while I'm happily using it as my primary search engine, it's by no means perfect, and the author claiming that Google is an example of "search tools that unerringly bring you to the page you want" is total nonsense. I suppose your odds might be better than typing in a domain name blindly, but I'm not so sure.

If I'm looking for a company, I always try the domain name directly *first*, and only after (and if) that fails do I use Google. Seems to work most of the time.

..The good and the bad

[tolan's my name]

Google is a wonderful tool, but there are times and situations were it fails. Its at its very best at [say] finding every article ever written on a line like 'ORA12345 Oracle', as there is only one possible meaning. It is weaker however when one wants to buy something, because often people have only partialy defined needs for what they want to buy before they engage in the buying process.

A search of 'Bicycle shop UK' will produce many hits, almost all of them not online bicycle retailers. which is why bikes.co.uk will always have worth.

Now my own view is that all retail should be stuck on a separtate domain [.shop par example], and the rest returned to the 'good ol' days', but it aint going to happen

Re:..The good and the bad

[Masem]

Remember "PQ"?

That is, some company, the name I forget, had grabbed a large batch of domain names that looked like "pq.com", such as "pbooksq.com", "pflowersq.com". The idea was that if you wanted something in those areas, you'd mind your Ps & Qs, and just typed in those names as URL and be whisked away to a portal run by that company for those products. (and yes, there was advertizing for this as well on the TV, as well as net ads).

So yes, this was nice, but it failed because the portal was for only products or sales by that company, and wasn't a price-comparative thing. Since the prices that this company offered were somewhat high compared to Amazon or other sellers, they weren't really turning a profit. They appear to be out of business, or have at least let those domains rot, as spot-checking that pattern shows none of them existing.

If .uk.co or .com *always* went to a page run by a non-profit group that simply listed vendors and possibly had competitive price checking scripts, those types of domains certainly would be of use. But I suspect that it's too easy to find numerous examples where one for-profit company owns the generic name to push their own brand, instead of a comparitive site. If anything, the organization of Yahoo is better than nothing for finding competitive prices for a generic type of product.

Nice article on google...

[Bazman]

In today's Grauniad:

Seeking Search Engine Perfection

Well worth a read.

A Subject (not Content) Directory?

[dschuetz]

Something I've been talking about for years is the concept of a "subject based directory." Pretty much all the web search engines work based on the content of a page, not the more abstract subject matter of the page. Some of the directories Google, Yahoo) get close to a good subject-based lookup, but they're not quite what I (think) I've been looking for.

What I'd like would be to go to a search engine, type in "ford," and get a list of websites, with a brief description of each. Not pages on a website, but a list of things like "Ford Automotive," "Ford Aerospace" (are they even still around?), "John Ford", "Ford's Theatre," etc. Maybe in decreasing order by some kind of popularity rating.

Or are the directories now pretty good at this kind of lookup? Google Directory did a passable job with "ford," but it's not well organized and still (apparently) takes its description information straight from the web page, rather than from a carefully crafted, entered-directly-into-the-directory abstract of the site. The "Realnames" service looks like it might have been a solution, but I think it's just moved the problem from a for-pay DNS issue to a for-pay keyword issue. (use "ford" there, and you get FordVehicles.com, no other choices).

This'd be easy enough to implement with some kind of meta tag, in which someone could place the legal and common name for their organization, or for the specific information on their site, along with a one-paragraph description. Search engines could then let people search against that "abstract" database.

Does this make sense? Is anyone doing anything like this (and I've just missed out, being under a rock)? Or are there big feasibility problems (like people stacking meta data) that I haven't addressed?

av.com

[mirko]

IMHO, Google has lost its accuracy and its results lack relevance compared to the all-time-favourite Altavista (which I usually access the light way).
I just can't find the equivalent of Altavista's syntax on Google.

Need an example ?
Remember the hint that appeared in italics :
Need a bedtime story ?
Type : +Fairy +princ* -dragon

(note the wildcard use)

There are also lots of short ways to find which pages refer to one another (+link:...) or if you want to filter whichever result after a given url part (+url:...)

But, on the bottom, the guy is right, most people now ask Google first instead of looking for a funky domain name which sounds like what they'd enter in the Google form.

Re:I think Google is getting a little too much cre

[Fweeky]

> although I also use opera and have configured it
> such that I only have the google search box on my
> toolbar.

I have it set up too, but I never use it; it's easier just to type "g foo bar wibble" in a nearby address bar.

You can make IE do this too, btw; HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Internet Explorer\SearchUrl\g, set the default value to http://www.google.com/search?q=%s. Repeat for other search engines.

(Yeah, editing the registry for something like this.. I know.. bleugh :)

If you search for my name...

[cperciva]

You'll find that the first page of results gives you a pretty good overview of who I am. One page is a project I ran while an undergraduate student; one page is a press release from my undergraduate university talking about me; one page is from an orchestra of which I was a member; one page is from Oxford's computing lab. I don't need to tell people my email address; they can find it very easily through the pages google provides.

All that is good and useful for me, but what of the other people (I know of three so far) who share my name? What if someone wants to contact them?

If we're going to rely upon Google to translate names into URLs, we're inevitably going to run into such problems, where only the most famous person/company using a name is brought up, even though some people will be searching for their lesser known isonyms.