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Comment by lowglow | Hacker News Reader

I feel desensitized by the countless number of TLDs that have come out recently. I guess I should be excited by .XXX, but I just am not.

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Not quite countless. There are 307 TLDs today, up from about 250 a decade ago. Most of this growth as been in non-Latin IDN domains (There are 21 gTLDs today, including .XXX)

There will however be a sea change in the future, ICANN is intending the open up applications for new gTLDs in 2012 that could see hundreds more TLDs added. So if adding the dozen or so new gTLDs in the last 10 years has seemed countless, it will get worse.

Is it so bad? It'll get easier to find the name you want as a domain.... http://<mydomain>.<tld>

If anything, so many tlds would devalue the existing .coms, .net, .org... if only slightly.

I think more and more people will rely on Google for navigational queries.

"Hey you should really check out this awesomestuff.sfdj website"

"I'll look at it when I get home."

... later in the day:

"Hmmm was it awesomestuff.com or awesomestuff.me ..."

"Let's ask Google for a link to awesomestuff"

I agree. I think a lot of people do this already, and not just for sites where they can't remember the exact URL. It's often just as quick to type 'bbc' or 'facebook' into the Google search bar, especially if Google is your homepage. You don't have to worry about typos, either. Some computer users I know, older users, access everything that way. When I asked one why, she replied that she found the browser address bar "fiddly".

Earlier this year Bing stated that "about 30%" of search queries are navigational.[1]

[1] http://www.bing.com/community/site_blogs/b/search/archive/20... (paragraph before penultimate screenshot)

I'm with you, and they know this too. That's why they produced such a happy-sounding threat letter video.

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