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Comment by andrewljohnson | Hacker News Reader

Founders really need to stop using misspellings for the name of their companies.

Number 1, people are going to have a harder times finding your site. This is somewhat mitigated by Google's technology around suggesting seatch terms, but not totally.

Number 2, you will have to spend five minutes explaining your name to every potential investor, customer, and even your friends, just so they know what your proper name is. That doesn't leave any time for what you should be delivering - your elevator pitch.

Number 3, it suggests you aren't very creative. Saying that all the good domain names are taken just isn't true. I've bought a number of good domain names in the past couple of years, none of which have been misspellings.

Use real words people.

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Unfortunately there are very few real words or even real word combinations that are not registered.

Clever misspellings have been a solution to that problem.

What do you propose as an alternate solution?

Here are some domain names me or my associates have purchased recently. There are good ones left:

trailbehind.com (also thetrailbehind.com)

greathive.com (also thegreathive.com)

loudmountain.com

darnnews.com

agent1099.com

photosensate.com

surelogic.com

These are all fine domain names made of real words.

The name of a domain is as subjective as the proverbial eye of the beholder, eventually all that counts is whether or not you can make it succeed in the market.

That's not a qualitative assessment of your 'good' domains, just an observation.

Agreed, and the fact of the matter is, any reasonable name will succeed, if backed by a great company.

I think a good name won't help you much, but a bad name can hurt you in tangible ways.

Bigtimebids.com is available.

>> Unfortunately there are very few real words or even real word combinations that are not registered.

Problem solved... I'll plug my own site for finding good, available domain names: http://Hotnamelist.com

Or, go out and BUY a good one: http://sedo.com or http://Afternic.com

Cheers for this link mate, having a look now

Ive been struggling looking for a new projects domain for days now, snapnames, freshdrop, domainpigeon (from here), so hopefully you might have some suggestions!!

Sorry but problem not solved.

It's nice that your site lists CowardlyAct.com, MountyBounty.com and SecuritySituation.com as available - but that's completely useless to me who's looking for a name that somehow makes sense in conjunction with my business model.

Furthermore a good name is supposed to be short and distinctive. Most names listed on your and similar services meet neither criteria. They consist of more or less randomly combined dictionary words which leads to generic 10+ letter domains like, well, SecuritySituation.

Who told you that names are supposed to be short and distinctive? Security Situation is a pretty damn good name if you're starting a security company. Impressing the web 2.0 fanboys with misspellings makes your company look illiterate to everyone else. If you're simply going after those fanboys (or girls) as you target audience then that is fine but considering how many people are web 2.0ers and how many regular people there are, when starting a company I'm probably going to go after the far bigger market.

Who told you that names are supposed to be short and distinctive?

My common sense and probably every marketing book in existance. Think about the internet brand names that you can recall from the top of your head. How many of them are longer than 8 letters?

Security Situation is a pretty damn good name if you're starting a security company.

Most certainly not. It's generic and unsuggestive. That kind of name may work for an information page ("Security situation in your neighbourhood") but not for most businesses.

>> Unfortunately there are very few real words or even real word combinations that are not registered.

I thought this too, but did a quick back of the envelope calculation:

The OED had 616,500 English words in the 1989 edition.

In 2003 there were ~24,000,000 dot coms registered.

Let's assume 2% of English words are usable in a 2 word domain name combination. That means there are ~ 12,000 words that you can combine to form a new domain. Which means there are ~ 144,000,000 possible 2 word dot coms.

So the majority of real world combinations are not registered if you only consider 2 word combos.

The market shows combos can be pretty random: surveymonkey, plentyoffish, craigslist, etc.

Markov chains FTW! http://codeismightier.com/2008/10/generating-domain-names/ - how-to http://suggestly.com - ajaxy implementation of the above (which is down right now)

So you say people have "harder times finding your site" being "mitigated by Google" and "you will have to spend five minutes explaining your name". So let's get in the wayback machine and set it for '93. Show me a dictionary with google in it or find me a member of the public who can guess it will have something to do with search.

Google was an accident, if you know your internet history.

The founders intended the word Googol: http://209.85.173.132/search?q=cache:p7kcdIwV8J0J:daily.stan...

We have bought some other domains that we've mapped to the site, but of all of the ones we bought, bidboxr.com seems to be the most popular by informal surveys. others that map to the site are: powrads.com, compelature.com, bidboxr.net, bidboxr.org

Can't you just come up with some two word combination? None of these names stick with me, and none strike me as easy to remember, and moreover, none give me an idea of what your company does.

I used to get paid to think up these names. Here's an exercise you can do. Think up words that apply to your company, and write them down. For example: money, profit, ads, auctions, etc. And also, you don't need to just stick with words that physically describe your company (though I think these are best). You can also look for words that describe your value proposition, and why you are better than your competitors.

Then, go over the list and see if you like any of the combinations. Also, just start free associating with words on the list and words off the list.

Another thing you can do is come up with imagery that you think might be good for an ad campaign or in the design of your site. With this sort of approach, you end up with names like monster.com.

Don't be afraid to use the dictionary, thesaurus, and to do hundreds of searches on Godaddy.com or similar.

Also, don't be afraid to seek out a friend who is good with words, or who tends to say funny or memorable things. I've long since ceased to work in creative at an ad agency, but my friends and colleagues ask me to come up with names for them these days.

And one final thought - it's not that important what your name is, as long as it's not confusing (which misspellings all are).

Domains are expensive... it is a shame. But I do agree that sometimes misspellings are hard. Kinda reminds me of when FaceBook was TheFaceBook.com... boy that was annoying.

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