Hacker News Reader

Comment by yarcob | Hacker News Reader

Fortunately domains don't really matter that much anymore. Address bars in pretty much all browsers are now search bars, and if you type a product name it will typically be the first result (as long as there aren't multiple products with the same name).

Sure, programmers like sweet and short domains, but customers don't care if your domain is widget.com, widget.net, widgetapp.com or companyname.xy/widget

Spending 5000 on a domain name is probably not worth it for the vast majority of startups.

There are some exceptions. If you are an email provider and your customers will use the domain in their email address it probably is a good idea to get a good domain.

But I really don't think that domain matters as much as founders think they do.

View on HN

You're right, but consider the hypothetical that instagram.com was squatted and they instead went with instagramapp.com or whatever. Today instagram.com would be very valuable for advertising and/or scamming purposes. Instagram would probably consider buying it for $500k, a drop in the bucket for them, just to get rid of the problem.

In Sweden we've "solved" this problem by a rule that says that if you incorporated the business XYZ then you're entitled to the domain XYZ.se. Incorporating requires $2500 in capital and you can't incorporate as "pizza" or any other common word, so squatting is not a problem there.

> if you incorporated the business XYZ then you're entitled to the domain XYZ.se

What happens if the domain is already registered? I think I've seen .se used as the ending of english words like say impul.se (first try, seems to be unused or squatted).

As I understand it, they can be forced to hand it over.

Sometimes it's about signalling strength, or dealing with a market that's not just consumers under 30. In those cases, I think the customers do 'care', or at least get some conveyed vibe from it.

Getting sales from big corps, for example, is often partly about your perceived current state of established-ness.

Yes, I believe this is the case. One thing are conventions. If domain name ZZZ is taken, you can use getZZZ, ZZZapp, and so on. It does not matter much, as almost nobody types www address. Plus there is huge amount of top level domains, so even if ZZZ.com is taken, there are 150 alternatives which sometimes are better than original .com.

Are we now at a stage that .com is no longer considers more 'trustworthy' than say .xyz ? I'm not so sure, which is why many people still hanker after the .com in the first instance.

That said, as a non-US person I'm not personally on-board with .com-for-everything, but I understand that Joe Public in the USA thinks differently.

> Are we now at a stage that .com is no longer considers more 'trustworthy' than say .xyz?

Generally, I'm not sure. But I (and I think the majority of the people I know) were beyond that stage a long time ago or never cared/understood to start with. As you mention, not being in the US might bias my opinions and the opinions I'm exposed to on the matter, so YMMV.

I'm not sure if it confers any SEO advantage, but I don't particularly care about that (the things I have hosted are only useful to people who already know about them, so SEO isn't a concern).

> trustworthy

That might be the wrong concept for the discussion though. Another key factor is whether somthine.com is more memorable or guessable than something.co.uk, something.site, something.link, ...

Replit moved to dotcom. https://blog.repl.it/dotcom

I think, as a start, any domain is fine but when you have gone big, you should acquire dotcom.

Surely the old adage of it's best to have the .com for SEO purposes still holds true, though? Is there evidence that it's no longer the case?

Search for “boingboing” and look at which domain comes first.

I’d say that engines are now smart enough, typically, to get you to the most likely place no matter what.

> it's best to have the .com for SEO purposes

It's not - and I doubt it ever was - about SEO in the technical sense (the hypothesis being that .com has some kind of innate SE ranking benefit compared to other TLDs).

To me it's far more that if you have a company called, say, 'YCombinator' then a huge number of people will simply assume you are to be found at YCombinator.com, simply because their experience is that all the other well-known brands live at .com, so why wouldn't you?

Why would you choose to fight that if you didn't have to?

Yes. But how does that work for app names?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com