Start unique and drop the “the” – some thoughts on URLs | Hacker News Reader

Start unique and drop the “the” – some thoughts on URLs

liamnewmarch.co.uk

22 pointsdphnx25 comments

This is a result of the inferior auto-complete implementation in Chrome. Firefox does not have this issue.

I'd note that it seems to be Chrome-specific problem. Firefox, for example, searches for any substring matches, not only prefixes (although they seem to reasonably prefer results that are matching on word boundaries).

They should've picked guardian.io and used 4em Droid Sans everywhere with lots of coffee mug stock photos.

gu.ardi.an

Handy tip: the Guardian own gu.com - so you can type gu.com to go straight to theguardian.com (they also use it for their URL shortener)

We[0] have the GU domain because the Guardian was previously Guardian Unlimited.

[0] No longer there but still think of GU very fondly

That sir is a very handy tip, especially on mobile where typing’s a premium.

It is? I've only recently started using a mobile device, but with android's drag-to-form-words mechanism, I can you type "guardian" faster than "gu". I don't know about iOS, though.

I tap faster than I swipe, although I use SwiftKey, so it makes tapping much much easier.

I do swipe on occasion, though. Depends if I am using two or one thumb.

I'm sure the domain without the "the" was taken, so this isn't particularly useful advice for someone moving to the crowded .com TLD.

Indeed - https://www.guardian.com/

That's fair, but is it really so much work to enter three extra keys on a url? That doesn't strike me as a convincing enough reason not to attempt a brand change, if it otherwise makes sense. (Unless there are many frustrated mobile users somewhere who've decided they've put up with long urls far enough!)

Using an article such as "the" in a brand typically indicates a desire to lay stake on a common noun as a proper noun, or at least the definitive instance of the noun. It often doesn't make sense when your brand is obviously a proper noun or otherwise unique already, but I suppose there's plenty enough newspapers having a variant of "Guardian" in their titles to warrant a push to definitive-hood.

Edit: A friend also pointed out that "guardian.com" is already taken by another established organization. I think that trumps my silly grammatical analysis :P

Well shouldn't it have been the-manchester-guardian.com :-)

Will be interesting to have a look and see how well or not the in house seo/dev team have done the migration

URLS were and I assume still are a massive part of the collective thought process in the Guardian but yeah, if you are GU then the internet will take whatever you say as canonical to be canonical regardless of seo strategy

didn't work when a major uk job site (no names no pack drill) stuffed up its canonicals on all its job category pages cost them 1/2 a mill in less than a week.

Are there really people who will decide "I want to read the Guardian now," and then when they find they have to type four or five letters into their browser bar instead of just one, will decide not to bother? It's now too much effort to type four or five keys? (It's possible, I suppose; I am way out of touch and I still don't understand much of what the kids do now - that thing where "Dave is the mayor of some street corner" was a total mystery to me)

Having 'the' at the start is not ideal, but Guardian Glass (who own guardian.com) no doubt wanted a lot of money for it.

In any case, all the cool kids use gu.com

From a branding perspective, if you're forced to use an underscore for a twitter or instagram name, always put it at the end.

Sad to see the Guardian go to a .com

This is superficial and hard to quantify, but .com has a junky feel to it nowadays. Their co.uk sounds more reputable.

To you, perhaps. To many tech people, perhaps.

But the Guardian is trying to reach more than that audience, and I'm sure there are lots of "Fox-News Americans" who will scorn the .uk and still find .com to be professional. They have a sense that .com is normal, and that other TLDs are inferior.

I think this is extremely accurate. I'm launching a new brand next month with a .co and I've found that people that are into tech things like it while the older generations give me a blank stare.

I wonder how well-received the coming .tech/software/app/etc. gTLDs will be. Will people still want to grab the .com for their company?

I think the dot com will be the traditional bet, but over time become one of those 'nice-to-haves' - - with the ridiculous amount of squatting on the most bizarre terms, other tlds are becoming far more attractive.

Above this, the dot co people are making great strides in offering a wide range of benefits to signing on. Not only discounts and freebies, but the potential of a community. In the future, I think more tlds will adopt this model to attract business.

This was part of my thinking in http://getstarter.com single key navigation to your favorite web sites, but for some reason it seems not to catch on that well.

"I don’t think I visit another site beginning with x"

Yeah yeah..!

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