Comment by thestepafter | Hacker News Reader

Comment by thestepafter | Hacker News Reader

The majority of people don’t browse the internet like people on hacker news. They type the domain name into the Google search home page, not the URL bar for the browser. Chances are they are going to type .com at the end. So in my opinion after observing this from many different people in all parts of life I think domain name is still very important. I personally only use .com. This has forced me to think outside of the box and I have come up with, in my opinion, some great company names that have a .com available.

Depending on what your company sells SEO is either going to be really expensive or you aren’t going to have to worry about it. In my experience and opinion from a purely SEO stand point you should have your business name or primary product / product category in the domain name. I typically don’t trust companies that out the product in the domain name though. For example, bestgloves.com or babyclothes.com. I try to buy based on honest reviews (getting harder and harder to find) but the majority of the internet just clicks on the top Google search result and typically buys from there.

So with all that being said, in my opinion, importance of domain name all depends on your target audience.

> They type the domain name into the Google search home page, not the URL bar for the browser.

I can confirm it - my father keeps doing that (I keep postponing this therefore very soon I'll have to try to explain him the difference, but I have to find an entertaining way to do that when mentioning IP-addresses, virtual hosts, DNS, etc... => difficult).

when i try to explain complicated topics to people not familiar with them, i try to simplify instead of going into detail.

one thing that worked nicely for me in the past when explaining domains: full domain name: actual internet address of a company, like a street address of a store. google.com is equal to streetname.number

if you know the number (eg tld) of the house, you just go there directly and enter the store.

if you do know the street (google), but do not know the number of the house (.com) you need to stop and ask someone for the way, and this is what google.com is for.

usually the big aha effect is that google.com is an address which leads you to a page that allows you to find other addresses.

going to google.cn (or whatever country you like) might help too, explaining how google has both .com and .cn and .nz and so on, all different "storefronts" of the same company, catering to different countries.

once that is understood, and if it was easily understood, maybe explain how the top bar (in most browsers) can be used for both searching for addresses and to input addresses directly, then set the default search engine to duckduckgo.

hope that helps :)

> actual internet address of a company, like a street address of a store. google.com is equal to streetname.number

Ok, thanks a lot for that, that part might work (I read all the rest but this might be the best foundation) => I might expand based on that - not a new idea, but to make it more explicit and more directly related to what is already known, it could work better than doing the usual abstract monologue which generates glassy eyes. Thank you! :)

> google.com is equal to streetname.number

Small correction: the left side of a domain name is the most specific. For example, `translate.google.com` is like `number.street.city`, not the other way around.

It may seem like the end of a domain name is like the street number, since it's often a country-code, but it's more like having company that's so big that they have the same street address in every city.

actually very true, i missed that, so obvious, thanks for the correction :)

Can't blame them when browsers design their user interface so that you will do a Google search instead of going to a URL. Because 99% of the funding comes from Google search.

I disagree with this.

Chrome's Omni bar, and even newer Firefox addressbar encourage the use of search engines, and I have never seen someone type "bestgloves.com". At worst, they search for Gloves on their favorite seller web site (which can be different in many countries, Amazon in US/EU, Shopee in Indonesia, etc).

> Chances are they are going to type .com at the end.

I really doubt most people do that these days. They’ll usually type a few letters of the name and the browser will fill in the rest. Type ‘wikip’ and you’ll get to Wikipedia.

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