The domain name situation is more grim than I ever imagined. If you don’t believe me, try going to Instant Domain Search and start typing o’s. You’ll find everything up to and including ooooooooooooooooo is taken. Try any word from English, Spanish, German, Swahili, or Hindi. All taken. I even tried resorting to trying to buy an expired domain.
On Saturday I saw an TV ad that said simply “Google ‘Denver Ford'” for more information. Part of this is surely that the car dealership couldn’t get www.denverford.com (it’s for sale). But the more important point is that the search textbox is replacing the browser URL textbox.
No one types URL’s into their browser anymore. Most people don’t know how. This is why so many people ener “amazon” into Google rather than typeing “amazon.com” into the brower textbox. (I can’t find the article about Google that gave the statistic. Anyone know the one I’m thinking of?)
The main points:
- The search textbox is replacing the browser textbox.
- Domain names, especially short names, don’t matter so much and the ones for sale are certainly overvalued.
- Search engines are becoming the new DNS^.