1993. I considered registering cocacola.com, sex.com, shell.com, etc. etc. Spent the money on consumables instead.
There are few moments I remember as clearly as making that decision.
There are few moments I remember as clearly as making that decision.
As I see it, the purpose of search engines is to route around squatters and find real content, no matter where it's hosted.
The domain name is also many times your brand. So it's true that you may not type "whatever.com", but you still type "whatever". In this particular instance, "whatever.com" actually exists, but has no content on it and thus it doesn't have a high ranking. But in other cases a developer of something like "go-whatever.ly" may end up with a world of hurt.
For startups, these considerations don't even factor in the importance that investors themselves place on well picked domain names.
If you think domain names are not important anymore, you're wrong.