

The allure of the .com domain name - ilamont
http://www.thestandard.com/news/2008/05/06/allure-com-domain-name

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goodkarma
Anyone who has tried to buy a domain knows that a lot of names have been
reserved by domainers who have not built out entire sites on the domains. They
are often parked and have little content other than pay per click ads on them.

The reason a lot of domainers like .com is that most browsers default to it.
For example, if you type "widget" into your browser address bar, most browsers
will redirect you to <http://widget.com>.

This captures a noteworthy percentage of traffic from internet users that
don't understand the difference between the browser address (URL) box (which
happens to be quite large and in the top center of most browsers) and the
search box (which is often much smaller and in the upper right corner).

~~~
Goronmon
I would say that logic isn't limited to just browsers. I'd argue most people
default addresses to .com when trying to recall them from memory.

~~~
goodkarma
Absolutely true! .com has definitely gotten a lot of mind share. This is a
great example of it:

"He pulled up Google News, quickly discovering the culprit. The vice
presidential debate between Cheney and Sen. John Edwards was going on, and to
defend his record, Cheney told viewers to look at Factcheck.com. Cheney had
meant to say Factcheck.org, a site run by the University of Pennsylvania.
Factcheck.com was one of Schilling's."

[http://money.cnn.com/magazines/business2/business2_archive/2...](http://money.cnn.com/magazines/business2/business2_archive/2005/12/01/8364591/index.htm)

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petercooper
This is an example of a bad headline for the content. It is not demonstrated
how or why ".com" has "allure" in the subtle sense.

The only clue the writer gives is that .com was "one of the first domain name
extensions available" so it had a "head start." She then moves on to say
domain registrars recommended .coms to customers and the runaway effect made
.com the most popular TLD. That is only casually interesting only to a
newcomer to the Internet, but merely a reminder of common knowledge to
established users.

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prakash
Purely from a performance perspective, browser & ISP caches are more likely to
have the .com TLD cached when compared to a .net, .org, .tv, etc. and hence
needn't look it up with the root servers.

This probably results in a performance optimization of .25% to .5% when
compared to the entire page being downloaded but none the less ;-)

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mchang16
Another interesting technical fact that I found out when I was doing the
research for this article was that prior to 2002, if someone typed a generic
term into the address bar, most browsers automatically tacked on the .com
extension, adding to the importance of the .com extension.

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silencio
a lot of browsers still tack on "<http://www>." and ".com" to a generic term
you enter in the address bar. Some of them redirect to a search page, but
still.

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aneesh
A few companies (justin.tv, drop.io, del.icio.us) have pulled off not being a
dot-com, but this required creativity and great marketing.

~~~
brandong
And I still can't remember how to get to the delicious site....

~~~
nertzy
Well, delicious.com works these days...

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webwatch
There are millions of dollars being spent on brand advertising for various
domain names - pretty much every one of them ending with .com. That is a
powerful marketing machine behind one TLD...

