nSathees

It was interesting to read an article in BBC titled “Dot brand versus dot com: Internet domains go head to head“. The author claim the brand has superiority over dot com.

As I always claim, it all depends on the angle you look at! Let me tell you some other points here.

Let assume that I want to buy a smart phone. Now if I know the brand I want to buy then I will go directly to their website and do my purchase. That is because the brand has done some off-line or on-line advertisement that made me to be aware of their product. What if I didn’t make up my mind on any particular product?

Will I go to smartPhone.apple or smartPhone.samsung or so to say smartPhone.google?

Definitely I am going type in “Smart Phone” in the address bar as many would do! At this point think about the flow of the search engine. Which link is ideal to bring at the top of the results? Is that smartPhone.com, smartPhone.org, smartPhone.apple, smartPhone.samsung or smartPhone.google? I bet that Google will not jeopardize their search result strategy for petty benefit of bringing dot brand in forefront.

I best bet is the smartPhone.com or the org site is going to show at the top of the search result page as they will have a review of all branded and non branded products. That’s what I was searching for. That would be the relevant result. That is what Google is good at and that’s why they lead the search market.

So, ultimately from the user perspective the open gTLD is much more valueable than the dot brand. The dot brand is good for those big corporates to show off their power of spending and pride to fight each other as the current patent war in courts all over the world. But, will never take the gTLD down as this author claims.

Do you think otherwise? Drop your thoughts below!

ccTLD stands for country code Top Level Domain. Read more at Wikipedia.

ccTLD is to dominate the web world? YES!

I say this because of the trend indicates strongly towards ccTLD. There are many reasons for this to grow rapidly. I’ll explore some of them here.

We should know the basic of Domaining. The target of this Domaining game is to get as much as possible visitors to the domain name. This is archived through many means and Search Engines play a significant roll here. Why?
Let me look from the surfer’s angle. My requirement is a dog. What will I do?

Possibilities . . .

Open web browser and type dog. Check the listing. What I see is the documentation of dog. That’s obvious the Wikipedia will rank high. Observe the dog.com ranks 2nd. So how many people are using search engine to search for dog? Its 823’000 people in a month within US and 1,830,000 globally searching the term “dog”. Bigger portion of the people will visit dog.com. Now that’s called business ;0)

What happens if you just type dog in address bar?

This is the catch point! You may have notice the browser directs to dog.com. That’s why the .com is the King. This is to change. The smart browsers of the future will direct to ccTLD. Why? Because people are more comfortable with an address in their own country. A browser from UK prefer dog.co.uk than dog.com.

“Know Devil is better than unknown God.”

While the research found this is true and growing smart browsers will revert to ccTLD than TLD as well as search engines will list accordingly.

Every thing else will follow. The dot com will not vanish from the picture but will be less valuable than the ccTLD counterpart.