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Comment by TweedHeads | Hacker News Reader

How about fixing the domain fuckfest we have today?

Most of these ideas will end up with stupid names like lulzdatr.com or bizzwarezz.com

Thats because .com is the king of the internet. The users know dot coms, the term is a mainstream one. And frankly the whole company name doesn't really matter, what does yahoo have to do with search? What does eBay have to do with auctions? Just get some creativity and come up with a word that sounds like a real word and you'll be fine.

Saying .com is the king of the internet sounds like a response from marketing/management. I suspect it isn't all that important and that this will probably be dropped in favor of a practical solution in the future.

# of .com websites making at least $1mm/yr? 9999999999999999

# of .us/.info/.me/.biz sites making at least $1mm/yr? 8

Yes its marketing, but that's because consumers pretty much got taught that one of the major ways to see if a business is legitimate is to see if it has the .com extension. Blame all the affiliate spammers who put up the crappy sites on the .info etc domain names to try to make a few bucks by using the bulk method

put simply, .com is a brand

No, the thing you put before .com is part of the brand. The .com just adds legitimacy.

That's part of the value of a brand. If I see anything that's .biz or .info, it might as well be .ru for how much I distrust it.

craigslist.org, anybody?

Yes, but guess what? Craigslist ended up buying Craigslist.com because it was a porn site and majority of the people ended up there because of habbit.

Oh, wow! That's unfortunate, yet slightly amusing.

Sure, in the same way that being located in San Francisco instead of Oakland is part of the value of a company.

Google already fixed this. No one directly navigates to domains anymore. The SERP is a popularity-ranked page of everything that should be at the domain for the keywords you searched on.

I do. Sure, I use google and bookmarks a lot of the time, but sometimes the shortest mental route to a site is its domain name. Ironically, GMail is one of these.

An interesting thought experiment would be what would happen if you removed all domain names. You own a random series of letters that you keep even if your IP address changes, but the sequence is totally non-mnemonic. Google and del.icio.us would be very important. But how would we get there?

Disambiguation pages like wikipedia.

I personally would like to get rid of http, www and com all along

Just type a name and presto!

I agree. Also, most browsers now have a search bar in house. in my experience, many people use the search features more often than the address features, even if they are going directly to the main page of a web site.

It's just easier to remember the name of a site than it's literal/direct address. Even if they are one and the same 90% of the time, it turns out to be faster using google.

You're absolutely right. Some .com's get away with misspelled names but the copycat effect has gotten ridiculous and shows a real lack of creativity.

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