> According to Web traffic analysts, people type Match.com into Google and then click the top result. Are these people stupid? No, they're smart: It takes a lot of work to remember every company's exact domain name
Yeah, it takes a lot to remember the domain match.com, that's why people go to google and type there match.com
From my experience, people do it because 1) they have no clue about the address bar, or 2) google is their home page and when they open their browser the focus is set automatically on the google's <input> element rather than on the location bar.
My wife told me that some of her coworkers will use their Yahoo homepage to search for Google, and from there they will search for Facebook. She even tried to teach them about the address bar, and they don't care.
I think for many people it doesn't really matter if there is a better way. They find a way to get what they want, and as long as they can remember that, there's no need to think about it anymore.
"My wife told me that some of her coworkers will use their Yahoo homepage to search for Google, and from there they will search for Facebook. She even tried to teach them about the address bar, and they don't care."
I'd compare it more to Paul Buccheit's gmail story, where users kept asking for a compose button but actually wanted a faster interface. What users say and mean are two different things.
Sometimes it's less difficult. For example, it took me a while to remember that the HN search engine is at searchyc.com. And sometimes it's faster: I can get to my uni's website by googling just keio instead of typing www.keio.ac.jp.
I think his point was that the example in the article makes little sense -- if you're typing "match.com" into Google you clearly haven't forgotten that the domain name is "match.com" ... You probably just don't know that you can type it in the address bar.
The example would have made more sense if the author had said people type "Facebook" looking for "Facebook.com"
Or, it's because it's easier to think about one entry box than two. I don't think I'm stupid, but I tend to use the google search box almost exclusively - half the time I'm doing a search, and that's what I want; the other half of the time I'm going to a top-level domain, and I get there almost as quickly via Google.
Why would I want to waste brain time deciding which box to type in if Google will do the right thing either way?
(and about 1% of the time I'm constructing a URL to a test server on localhost. Then I use the address bar - for some reason, google seems to give much poorer results for localhost URLs.)
In defense of the user ......
sometimes the user may not know the exact domain name and a google search makes more sense.
To extend the TalkingPointsMemo example used in the article,consider the fact that the TalkingPointsMemo logo says "TPM".
A user who has heard about tpm will be better off typing in "tpm.com" in their search bar. The second google result is for the talking points memo website.
oth typing in tpm.com will take you to some other company's website
This may be a big win for Chrome, actually. If everyone normally just uses google anyway, the address bar and google's search have the opportunity to merge.
More traffic to google, more ad dollars. I guess internet explorer is in the same position, but somehow I can't see Microsoft moving in that direction. Maybe I'm wrong.
I've found I sometimes type domain names into the search box just because my fingers are better trained to use "Ctrl-K" than "Ctrl-L" or "Meta-D". Especially since "Ctrl-K" is pretty cross platform, while shortcuts for the location bar vary by OS and browser.
I don't know if I completely agree with why the author thinks this is unnecessary. However, I do agree that this would be a bad thing. I think making domain names anything under the sun would make it harder to find things and more confusing overall. I like the defined structure of the specific tld's that exist now and it does feel like a 10k fee for new ones is a money grab.
That sounds prohibitively expensive for things like news.yc (does this site produce money at all?), or my blog, or fark, or any other site that isn't backed by some sort of multi-million-dollar corp. and generating a couple million uniques a day (or more).
My prediction is that, especially at that cost, this will fail MISERABLY. .com will still remain the brand-name, and anything else will be a generic.
Similar to .net, .biz, .tv, .anything other than .com
What really needs to happen is for icann to have a review board that can determine if cyber-squatting is taking place or not.
The board needs to exist because a 16 year old sitting on theirname.com because they haven't bought hosting or anything yet, and a company that is sitting on a few hundred THOUSAND domains hoping to sell them are drastically different. I am perfectly fine with the former, and believe that the latter is a cancer on the DNS.
Basically their needs to be a terms of use that prohibits cyber-squatting.
As someone who has spent hours whois'ing for domain names coming up with a name for a new project, I couldn't agree more with the statement about squatters being a cancer. On the other hand, my guess is that squatters make up the lions share of registration fees...
Hard to bite the hand that feeds you. (ICANN does get a big chunk of the reg/maintenance fees, right?)
What do you mean, this rules out news.yc? That already works:
$ ping news.yc
PING news.yc (174.132.225.106): 56 data bytes
64 bytes from 174.132.225.106: icmp_seq=0 ttl=47 time=204.946 ms
In fact if I was PG I'd deny access to any other host in the request headers .. that'll keep out the proles.
Anyway, I think the new gTLD scheme will be a (qualified) success. Just not quite for everyone. But a lot of people will snap them up. http://www.ibm/ will be irresistable, and there's a lot of interest already from cities, etc (.paris, .roma, etc).
On the subject of domain squatting - all I wish they'd do is massively raise the prices on .coms. It is ridiculous for people to be able to squat on them for $7 a year. And if they are sold, or for sale, the owner should have to pay property tax at the sale price for the duration of his ownership.
I don't mind people owning and trading "investment grade" .coms - what I can't stand is people buying tens of thousands of the damn things and then just sitting on them because they're so cheap.
How about the price depends on how many names you have? That way the little guy can have his $7 domain but if you want to buy thousands of domains each successive one is more expensive and having millions of domains is prohibitive (as there is really no good reason to have them anyway).
That's a neat idea but might be a hassle to enforce, since people could use different registrars, etc. I really like the idea of making domains taxable like property, simply because the tax system already exists and is ruthlessly effective.
Combine that with, say, a price rise to $100/yr minimum charge per domain; that could include, say, hosting services or an ssh cert or something, the point is you cannot pay less than $100 per year per domain you own. That would hit the domainsquatting industry like a nuclear bomb.
Having names ending in ".com" is great - it says explicitly that the thing is a web address. Just like how the hyphenation of a phone number 123-456-7890 tells you right away that it's a phone number. This is part of why ".com" is more desirable than ".net", ".org", et al. It also shows how blatantly stupid this idea is, since it removes all framing from a web address, making the web harder overall to use.
I guess all those .no, .de, .it, .se, .dk and all those other national TLDs just represent pretend-sites then. Not to belittle you, but you seem to have an incredibly Americanized and introverted impression of how people percieve DNS names.
I have .com's, .net's and .org's. I use different TLDs for sites I believe represent different kinds of content, purpose and community. Having everything as .com would seem incredibly unnuanced for me.
This isn't meant to be my view, this is how the internet is viewed by the average non-techie. Yes, I realize how West-centric the point of view is, and that's unfortunate. But it's exactly why we have "dot-com businesses" and the "dot-com bubble", as opposed to the "dot-com-and-net-and-org-and-co-uk-... bubble".
At least keeping the set of TLDs small and restricted to standardized names, or countries that people using them will recognize, helps to keep the recognition problem manageable. But allowing anything and everything for a domain name removes all hope of recognizing one without context.
This isn't meant to be my view, this is how the internet is viewed by the average non-techie.
That would be a non-techie in the US. Outside the US, people have to deal with more TLDs, more people are multilingual and hence exposed to more information from more countries, in more languages.
If non-techies in the rest of the world have one common trait, it is that they recognize the www-prefix as "Internet", not the com-suffix.
> We all should follow Shaq's example—don't ever pay for a screen name or a domain name again.
The author doesn't really understand how trademark law works -- companies need to actively defend their trademarks in order to keep them. So when you see a company taking legal action against someone using a name similar to theirs, it doesn't always mean that they expect or even care to win the case, but legally they need to prove that they care about the trademark.
In short, what works for THE_REAL_SHAQ wouldn't work for an actual business.
I can see a lot of potential for phishing abuse with this new system. Slight misspellings of longer TLD's especially. I know that ICANN is claiming that they are going to keep a tight hold on this sort of thing but the reality is it is tough to keep on top of.
It also looks like misaligned incentives to me. If ICANN is getting $25k / year per TLD... do they really want to notice? Won't they decide that they're better off waiting until there's a lawsuit? (that way they won't have to refund the 25k)
It seems like random tlds would produce some seriously confusing site architecture.
If you were to pick .companyname as your tld.. then what would your homepage be? home.companyname? Where do you go from there? home.companyname/contact or contact.companyname? what about a sub-page of that page? What do you put in an ad? just go to .companyname? or go.companyname? the possibilities are endless.
Every site would likely use their own rules. The simple tlds we have now are confusing enough for consumers.
I think you need to learn more about the DNS system.
When you say lower I don't know which direction you mean, but it doesn't matter: there is no difference at all between any of the levels in DNS. None. They all get resolved in exactly the same way, just at different servers.
Eg: www.en.google.com
You start at the root sever and ask it about www.en.google.com and it says "I don't know, but I know that .com can be found at foo".
You ask foo: and it says I don't know, but google.com can be found at bar.
You ask bar and it says: I know this one, and it gives you the answer despite it being more than one level.
They get resolved in order as you explained, but
en from en.google.com will only be resolved at Google's host DNS.
I defacto own any weird combo of third, forth, etc order domains that live under my registered second level domain.
So there is no way to do as you suggest in your original post with out substantially altering the DNS system by inserting one more layer into the public side.
I could rent ars.danthewelder.com to you, but I don't think that's what you really meant in your original post.
That isn't so. You don't have to change anything, you just add some more names for the root level servers to resolve.
Everything will work just fine, with no changes at all on the client end, and no changes in the servers, except maybe you need a bit more hardware in the root servers.
I told you - there is nothing at all special about any of the levels. danthewelder is just a name for the .com server to resolve, it could resolve any names, and .com is just a name for the root server to resolve - it could resolve any names.
For example there is no reason at all you could not have email at ars@com - just com, with no other part to the name and http://com/ could work just fine. There is no address set up for com, but there could be - those layers are not specially singled out.
If you sell person.slate.com to someone when slate.com is already sold to someone else, that means who ever owns slate.com cannot have their own person.slate.com subdomain.
Tell me how DNS is gonna figure that out from a string of text URL?
What you propose cannot be done with out taking something from the people who already own a particular domain.
Yeah, it takes a lot to remember the domain match.com, that's why people go to google and type there match.com
From my experience, people do it because 1) they have no clue about the address bar, or 2) google is their home page and when they open their browser the focus is set automatically on the google's <input> element rather than on the location bar.