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Comment by walrus01 | Hacker News Reader

I agree with the point of 'doesn't mean credible', but the traditional TLDs of .com/.net/.org are also much better recognized as an actual TLD.

If I start a new taco truck company and put "burrito.services" or "burrito.catering" or "burrito.ai" in a huge font on the side of the trucks, a fairly large number of people aren't going to immediately recognize that as a web site address.

On the other hand, if I'm lucky enough to get the domain burrito.net , most people will recognize that as something they can type into a web browser address bar.

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Conveying it's website is easy though -- stick a protocol or www in front of it. Or even underline it an colour it blue!

www.burrito.ai or https://burrito.ai is obviously a website to any layman.

Yes -- a server admin will tell you they are all different but generally speaking it will redirect to a preferred naming convention.

But that looks very ugly in branding for the side of a truck.

[www.]burrito.ai

wit.ai

www.wit.ai

> If I start a new taco truck company and put "burrito.services" or "burrito.catering" or "burrito.ai" in a huge font on the side of the trucks, a fairly large number of people aren't going to immediately recognize that as a web site address.

Well, unless you put "http(s)://" in front of it.

A pretty good percentage of people are just going to remember it as burrito.com. Alternate TLDs are fine for clickable media, but fall apart in print form.

I'm pretty sure this is why (in the US at least) we end up with online gambling sites located at .com addresses with "free" counterparts at .net addresses. You can advertise the free .net sites because they're not gambling with money, but people typing the addresses in simply go to the .com versions.

Fascinating! I'd never noticed this before. Normal television is dominated by those free-to-play gambling sites, and as you mentioned overwhelmingly they seem to use .net. I always wondered how they made money.

Certainly, though the trend for printing vehicles, business cards, letterheads, outdoor advertising signs and such seems to be to omit the "http(s)://" or "www"... Since in real world use almost nobody is actually typing the http:// into the browser anymore, as might have been necessary when we were running Netscape Navigator in 1999.

> As early as 1996 browsers were already inserting the http:// and www. for users automatically (rendering any advertisement which still contains them truly ridiculous).

https://blog.cloudflare.com/the-history-of-the-url/

That, and in a typical virtualhost based http/https setup now, it's standard DNS configuration to point the A record for the 'root' of the domain (domainname.com) to the same IP address as the www.domainname.com DNS record.

For some reason I typed "www" for an emberessly long time.

> Well, unless you put "http(s)://" in front of it.

Go with "https://www.burrito.services/" and make it blue and underlined, just to be safe. I'm kind of kidding, but I also kind of suspect the blue font and underline would probably be more immediately recognizable for many people than the HTTPS protocol prefix.

Or "www", as in "www.burrito.catering".

That actually strikes me as anachronistic, because it became popular to drop "www" (not only in print media, but also in the canonical FQDN) well before these sort of TLDs became available.

This is correct, though I still believe most people understand the meaning that it's a website if I prepend the "www".

On the other hand, I guess most people probably aren't typing the url out anyway but googling it instead.

Also correct, though using my example and weird new TLDs, let's say in a theoretical example I see a bus stop outdoor advertising board on the street that says:

"BURRITO.CONSULTING"

I'm going to think, "uhhh, is that a website? Well, I recognize .consulting as a TLD. I guess it must be. But that's weird..."

but then if i see the same sign

"WWW.BURRITO.CONSULTING"

I'm going to think: "Well that's definitely somebody's website, but what a weird and anachronistic way of printing it, and why is it using one of those new long generic TLDs anyways..."

Yes, 'www.burrito.consulting' looks akward, but most people born after 1960 will recognize it as the URL for a web site.

People outside tech generally don't realise that domain.tld and www.domain.tld are two separate hostnames, and adding www. makes it much more recognizable to the general public.

yeah it is a techy thing. Most people who are not techy use "WWW", we just got to go with this. Edit your web server config to handle that.

Exactly. There is plenty of discussion to be found online in techie circles, but in short, if you’re going to use a naked domain to host your website, at least redirect www to it.

On sites for government we always have lot of confusing emails if we don't also make the www in front of subdomains work:

So for subdomain.burrito.com, we redirect the wwww.subdomain.burrito.com

People are just so used to it.

No that was just idiots being fucking lazy

Lazy? Running without www can actually be a decent amount of work:

1. Avoiding the relatively common pairing of {a host whose IP address changes without warning so you need to CNAME it; a DNS provider that doesn't offer CNAME flattening a.k.a. ALIAS a.k.a. ANAME}.

2. Scoping session cookies so user agents don't also send them to your subdomains.

And maybe even more stuff I'm forgetting.

I think none of http, www or .com actually work anymore for all audiencies. What I see more often is stuff like "<instagram logo> @burrito_catering" or "<facebook logo> burrito_catering".

It is interesting to see the same signs and logos on non-north american businesses where much the same approach has been adopted for GFW-compliant things within China, where a retail store might have some nice glossy logos for alipay, wechat pay, weibo and qq

Interestingly burrito.catering used to be a thing it looks: https://web.archive.org/web/20180804010349/http://burrito.ca...

I think that's a good thing. There should not be an unmitigated explosion of TLDs. A few will pop up that appeal to lots of users, say .taco, and the .com monoculture can be split into a manageable number of TLDs.

Humanity is great at this stuff. Natural language is enervated with side channels everywhere. At some point, people may converge on "what a TLD looks like" and new TLDs will often have an ineffable TLD-ness about them.

> There should not be an unmitigated explosion of TLDs.

too late.

I think the reverse is going to happen. In the search for short, expressive names more TLDs are going to proliferate, so eventually many common words will become TLDs. It will be hard to know what is a TLD, except for a few old, well-known ones, like .com, .org, .net, etc.

I think those custom TLDs will work just fine. It might confuse customers a bit, but most of them will just type "burrito.catering" in Google and miraculously reach the correct website anyway.

EDIT: In case it's not obvious, the fact is that most people don't type the website address in the URL bar. They type it in the Google search bar.

Most people don't even know that .catering is a domain name, so they might not recognize it as an actual website... burrito-catering.com would be much better imho

Also, a weird TLD like ".catering" usually means you're trying to use a generic word in the domain name, "burrito" in this case, which makes it even harder to remember than something more unique + ".com".

The effect is that people have to now remember two generic dictionary words. "burrito" and ".catering", or wait, wasn't it "tacos" and ".food" or something? And like you said, I'm sure most people don't even recognize that ".catering" is a TLD, whatever that is, and the domain name just looks like `<genericword>.<genericword>` making it all the more confusing and arbitrary.

It's like having to remember where the periods went in "del.icio.us" and, if you couldn't, googling "delicious" (until it caught on) was incredibly unhelpful. Just like googling "burrito catering" doesn't necessarily take you to "https://burrito.catering".

I think even a random brand name + ".com" is still preferable to most of these new TLDs.

Even then, you've got a large SEO and trademark barrier. Can you out-rank Qdoba for the words "burrito" and "catering"? If you do, can you use your trademark recognition to fend off competitors at better-burrito-catering.com?

Like Qdoba, choose something unique. The domain caterrito.com is a little overspecific, but memorable, unique, easily trademarked, and available.

I think there's a problem worth solving here. With the DNS, people didn't have to bother remembering IP addresses or even know what they mean. With search engines, people no longer have to bother remember URLs or even know what they mean. That's a good thing, IMHO.

All we need now is to create a syntax for "internet identifiers" which is instantly recognizable as such. Enter ... drumroll ... @burrito.catering?

The choice of generic words like "burrito" and "catering" is a marketing decision. The original example was mostly a placeholder.

Maybe it's time for good 'ol www to make a comeback.

If I tell my mother to go to a specific website (example.com), she will go to google.com, wait for the page to load, then type the website into the search box and semi-randomly click a result, which isn't always the correct one. I've explained to her that if she has a web address, she can skip the googling step, but she doesn't seem to get it.

I've also tried explaining to her that the address box doubles as a search box, but she still goes to google.com to search. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

At this point the URL bar is a search bar.

I had a similar experience with a side project. I used an .app tld since it was available and, hey, it seemed kind of cool. Then I told my friends and they were totally confused- “your apps not on the App Store?”

Ugh. Lesson learned.

I own a .app domain and in naming a folder on my Mac that I lost the ability to open the folder in Finder. Cracked me up and outside of the terminal I could find no solution.

Right click and View Content should help you out

This is good to note. I remember I was trying to hit return to rename it and that would just open it. I was probably tired because I felt so flabbergasted! It looks like you can rename from right click too. Not sure how I missed that

Theres a mac toggle to show hidden files/folder in finder. The prefix . makes those folders hidden

Thanks for this reply - for me it was “website.app” so this wouldn’t have applied

I might think that your company is providing Haskell consulting services since monads are like burritos [1].

[1]: https://blog.plover.com/prog/burritos.html

How about putting a Chrome icon next to 'burrito.catering' as if it were a social network? The implications are awful but the results might be effective

I fear we are going that way. It's already become almost a default industry standard for a lot of retail customer facing things to have the trifecta of nicely rendered, equally sized icons for facebook, instagram and twitter next to their brand name.

If your engagement strategy relies on users typing in your domain name you need to sue whatever time displaced guru faxed you their internet marketing manual

Not my point at all, rather, that a well chosen domain name that's immediately recognizable as such, and a part of the corporate identity and trademarks, is an essential part of having an Internet presence.

Also ultimately your domain name and wherever its MX record points to is the start of authority for setting up official business accounts with all of the popular social media promotion channels (you sure aren't letting your social media people run the company instagram page from an account linked to their personal gmail accounts, are you?)

By no means would I say that people should ignore all the other ways of driving traffic to a company's online marketing presence, via all other modern means of social media (instagram, tiktok, facebook, twitter, whatever is the new hot thing of the current year). And having a dedicated app, partnership with third party food ordering services if you're something like a burrito delivery service.

> you sure aren't letting your social media people run the company instagram page from an account linked to their personal gmail accounts, are you?

If you're running a burrito truck, there's a good chance this is exactly what's happening.

In the theoretical example I didn't literally mean a burrito truck, but a silly example of "I'm running a business in $marketsegment and I'm going to print all my company vehicles with $companynameurlrelatedtomarketsegment". The burrito part was chosen as a placeholder much as we might use Alice, Bob, Charlie in a discussion of cryptosystems.

I think my statement holds for most small non-tech businesses.

Many of them have companyname@gmail.com business email addresses and while I hope their social media accounts are at least registered from that email account, I wouldn't be surprised if many are linked to a personal account. That is, if they have a dedicated email account for the business at all. Especially with older non-tech-savvy small business owners, there's a chance they just use whatever email address someone made for them.

Another thing about new domains is that sometimes they can get caught up in spam filters.

I already suspected that reliably sending an email from an .xyz domain is very difficult, but I learned the hard way that that lots of enterprise filters also block emails that contain links to any domain ending with .xyz, so we had to use something less fancy, so a longer .com was it.

I think most people these days may not use URLs at all. They will type whatever is written on the side of your truck into their search engine, which is also their address bar, and they will click on the first result.

They will probably type whatever is written with the name of the city after it

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