Why do Chinese websites use numbers in their domain names?

There's another reason: combination of numbers can be made to sound like words or sentences (e.g.: 360 = longing to see you again). http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Numbers_in_Chinese_culture#Comb... http://www.my-new-chinese-love.com/chinese-digitalk.html

I don't think the article solved the mystery as the Chinese are not at all unfamiliar with the Latin alphabet.

Chinese students learn the Latin alphabet and use them to spell words before learning Chinese characters. Chinese keyboards only consist of Latin characters. To enter a Chinese character, you type its pronunciation and then select the desired character from a on-screen menu.

This is interesting, but has anyone noticed that .cn URLs and Chinese .com's seem to always be a combination of ASCII roman characters and arabic numerals, rather than Chinese characters? Why is this? Is writing in pinyin and converting the URL to Chinese undesirable?

On a side note, has anyone ever noticed Chinese characters in the URLs indexed by Baidu? Is Baidu even able to index URLs with non-ASCII Chinese characters? I've only ever seen roman characters in the URLS they index.

Some one has posted the answer to this here : https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7694076

This property also makes wifi network passwords easy to guess - generally stores just set it to be the store's phone number.

I suspect this is a shorter duplicate of http://www.newrepublic.com/article/117608/chinese-number-web... which was on Digg (IIRC, or maybe reddit) a couple of days ago. It was quite a good article.