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The Curious Histories of Generic Domain Names
cheezitmike writes "ITworld.com uses the Wayback Machine to document the histories of five generic domain names: music.com, eat.com, car.com, meat.com, and milk.com. 'In this brave new Web 2.0 world, it's almost a badge of honor to have a Web site name that only hints at what the user will find there (see Flickr) or is so opaque as to offer no clue at all as to what the Web site is about (see del.icio.us). It's easy to forget the first Internet gold rush of the mid-to-late '90s, when dot-com domain names based on ordinary (and, investors hoped, marketable) nouns and verbs were snapped up by hopeful companies from the humble geeks who had purchased them (often ironically) in the early '90s.'"
Well, I must say I never thought of making a /. article out of this one, but since about 1999 which is when I started working on my own computers for hobby, I would use stupid.com as a network test to see if I was online or not and not just loading a cached page (since I only go there when I am testing my network once in a blue moon...) One thing I have noticed about this site, it still feels like I'm in 1999 when I load it...
...and it should be known by now
He's not talking like Yoda, he's talking like Richard Lovelace. To quote: "Stone walls do not a prison make / Nor iron bars a cage."
:o)
Someone please tell me that this is still a well-known quote, even if the source isn't. Please
You are wrong. Web searching was available from Altavista.com, Yahoo.com, and Excite.com LONG before Google.com made a meaningful impact on the World Wide Web. Hell, even AOL's proprietary crapware gave you the ability to search the web.
Support the 30 Hour Work Week!!!
You give Google WAY too much credit. They were a late, late entrant to the search field, and were far more important in ad revenue than they ever were in search. Think Archie > Jughead > Lycos > AltaVista, Excite...... > google
Actually, it's the other way around. Opus is singluar, opera is plural.
Blocked Site Error.
http://www.whitehouse.com/ is not available in the Wayback Machine.
Ahhh.. the good old days, when Poop.com was a shop for fossilized dinosaur dung. Endangered feces, indeed.
Josh Woodward
Reminds me of art.com, a web site I consulted for (different company from current owners of that domain). Before the site specializing in selling posters and prints was launched in the late 90s, the art.com domain belonged to Advanced Rotorcraft Technology, some helicopter tech organization. IIRC, the poster company paid something like half a million dollars for the domain.