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Comment by themagician | Hacker News Reader

Does it even matter anymore?

Domains have been replaced with apps and search anyway. Outside of maybe the top 100 domains, how many people are actually typing out a domain?

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Websites are still super relevant, especially for more serious / professional usages, or in random circles like gaming (since PC gaming is a thing that refuses to die). Domains are still the primary way you get to control your web presence, and websites are still easier to spin up than apps while providing much more flexibility and control.

I do think it depends on what kind of sites you are building. If it's say a recipe website, sure people will just Google it and click on a link. But for websites with a specific purpose I think a easy-to-remember or at least a not-sketchy looking domain name still has some values. Some random examples: wikis (which actually have a .wiki TLD now), professional tools like Figma, a service that you want to sell, or let's say a social site like Discord, I feel that having a clean domain name still makes a difference. I don't know if anyone will ever be able to quantify it though.

E.g. I have been following gaming tournaments, and a lot of them are hosted on start.gg. I find that I can definitely remember it much easier than otherwise and I don't want to use an app for something like that, nor do I feel like bookmarking it.

(Note: To be fair though, start.gg is using a country-TLD and I personally have a distaste of abusing country TLDs like .gg/.io/.ly/.tv/etc but that's another story)

I wonder if there’s a better alternative to current domain formats? Like, wouldnt it be great if you could just use your organization name without an extension? Like just google or apple or whatever. Instead of google.com or apple.com

You can’t register tlds with those names anyway (a random person can’t register google.xyz) so why bother with extensions? Maybe not get rid of the altogether but as an alternative?

AOL keywords!

You joke, but that was a better system and user experience than whatever the world we have now...

Except that it wasn't, because I didn't have AOL and thus they never worked well for me like a simple domain name did.

It's possible to register at the root, but ICANN has disallowed it for gTLDs (countries see ccTLDs as TLDs they "own" so ICANN isn't interested in trying to impose too many rules on them - http://ai. )

And companies have definitely purchased their own TLD for use cases that don't violate ICANN. For example:

https://blog.youtube

https://applecard.apple

https://pki.goog/

https://goo.gle

and of course https://registry.google / https://blog.google which was the domain submissed.

I think people get more value out of the unified search/url bar "just working" without having to think how to use it than they'd get out of not having to type ".com". If they want that kind of workflow they kind of already have it in the form "apple" enter -> first result.

It would also mean every single word entry would have to hit the root level of this public name lookup system since the client wouldn't know until after it checked.

> It would also mean every single word entry would have to hit the root level of this public name lookup system since the client wouldn't know until after it checked.

Caching at multiple levels should work fairly well for this?

Theoretically but e.g. google.com has a TTL of 5 minutes, TLD responses usually have something like a 48 hour TTL associated. Drop that cache timer then multiply by a huge factor because everyone is hitting TLD lookups for random things like "sausage" instead of ".com" and it's easy to imagine the majority of the root traffic volumes becomes bogus lookups instead of actual requests. Once it's into ".com" it's off the public infrastructure and volume becomes a problem of the current pay to operate TLD system.

Could that be done right? Sure, at which point Google would probably want to keep the 5 minute TTL instead.

exactly, they aren’t

they click ads and direct links in their group chats and timelines

it’s been like that for a loooong time, entrepreneurs are just clinging to SEO concepts from a decade ago in a void of alternate frameworks that would apply generically

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