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Comment by neilk | Hacker News Reader

I recently obtained a five-letter domain name (Grovr) in .org/.net/.com, and felt good about doing so on the cheap.

I hit on the that name out of desperation leading to silliness. The idea has to do with directed acyclic graphs of trust relationships, hence trees, hence "grove".

There aren't a lot of real-world analogs, so I'd been struggling to find some short name that explained the concept. I was working with a few others until recently and they had picked names like "layervote" which I never liked much. "Grovr" is obscure, but it makes me happy, and I'll probably make trees the fundamental graphic theme and metaphor.

But now you're telling me that misspellings are actually a big problem? How much of a problem, quantitatively?

Does that outweigh googlability? (On the other hand, if you add one letter, there is a popular children's TV character there which I'll never outrank, so that might be a problem.)

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"But now you're telling me that misspellings are actually a big problem? How much of a problem, quantitatively?"

When you verbally tell someone about your site, how do you do it? Do you spell out the domain name? If not, people are probably having trouble finding it because it's not a standard spelling. And looking at the name I'm not even sure how to say it (is it "groover" or "grover"?). If you do spell it out, that should be an even bigger indication that people are going to have trouble because you had to spell it out in order for them to find it.

That's not really quantitative, but I see your point.

Flickr was the prototypical Web 2.0 name, and I always thought the unusual spelling was a plus, since it made it more memorable, but perhaps there were a lot of other potential customers who were lost at step 0.

And I suppose you have similar conclusions about domain hacks, or using dictionary word + obscure TLD?

I suppose I am aware that for the average person, a website address is "www.____.com" or nothing. But I have an irrational love of interesting domain names. Perhaps it's bad to indulge that.

EDIT: The US government has some guidelines for domain name usability here. Usability isn't quite everything, but it's probably worth serious consideration.

http://www.usability.gov/articles/newsletter/pubs/032007news...

Yeah, definitely avoid domain name hacks. It's a huge gamble and even if your product is successful, it probably would have been more successful with a better name.

I thought the 'web 2' domain names came about, as most dictionary words had been taken. Take a dictionary word and make a small alteration - so that it is no longer a dictionary word - and it's likely you have something unique.

Search engine auto-correction must be an issue though!

I'd probably pick obscure word combos, that wouldn't naturally occur together. Good fun trying them out in a search engine too.

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