<i>When coming up with a new business name, sure, it's probably possible to find a suitable name in .net space, but these days, why bother? Unless it's unique you'd not be able to find the same name free in the .com space, which is where everyone would probably look in first. Better to simply research/brainstorm further and find a name you can acquire/repurchase in the .com arena and bypass all the confusion/customer education.</i><p>On that note, I recently launched a new domain search tool called Lean Domain Search [1] which makes finding available .com's infinitely easier than it's ever been. It pairs your search term with 2,500 other keywords commonly found in domain names and instantly shows you which are still available, returning on average 1,200 available domain names per search.<p>Given the abundance of great .com's still out there, there is no good reason <i>not</i> to use a .com for your site over any of the other TLDs especially since as the author points out, for most normal people websites === .com.<p>[1] <a href="http://www.leandomainsearch.com" rel="nofollow">http://www.leandomainsearch.com</a>
They misdefined "TLD" as the "Amazon" in "Amazon.com" when it actually refers to the "com".<p>Such a glaring ignorance makes it hard to trust the author's domain expertise. Pun intended. Reading the rest of the article proved my instincts.
I am the article author.<p>Thank you to the numerous people who took to time to email me and correct me about a definition. In this article, I refer to the entire root of a domain name e.g. Amazon.com as the TLD. I made a mistake, it is just the .com component of this name that is the TLD. I hope this error didn’t mask the enjoyment of the article for you. I appreciate all the feedback I receive.
"It’s interesting to note that the distribution differs from the the traditional pattern used in the English lanuage: E,T,A,I,O,N,S,H,R,D,L … Some of this can be explained by the fact that domain names are not just for the consumption of English speaking people. Even though other regions have their own domains, since .com has become the lingua franca, many businesses simply default to .com (For those interested, there is an interesting article on Wikipedia about the differing relative frequencies of letters in other languages)."<p>That may be part of it, but the author doesn’t recognize at all the likelihood the letter I is used more frequently probably due to Apple’s product naming influence, imitation from other companies pre-pending the letter before their prouducts and services, and the fact that ‘I’ is a strong, powerful pronoun.
I don't know if it is fair to say that a period is part of the domain name. It just separates out the subdomain. news.ycombinator is the subdomain 'news' on the ycombinator name, whereas dashes have no actual information pertaining to them.
Random fun fact: Sanford Wallace once crashed AOL's mail server by sending mail that was allegedly from "howmuchwoodcouldawoodchuckchuckifawoodchuckcouldchuckwood.com".
<i>Having access to a database of domain names, I decided to run some more analysis on the .com and .net databases.</i><p>Anyone know of such a database that is also public?