Domains for the Rest of Us • Hacker News Board

Re: Domains for the Rest of Us

#201

Post by rovr138 » Tue, Sep 22, 2020, 12:03 PM UTC

albertshin wrote: post #53

quadrangle wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

huge downside: you have to say the hyphen explicitly out loud, and if a site exists without the hyphen, you'll get lots of mistakes. Are you thinking that everyone only gets to sites from actual hyperlinks rather than via human speech?

but does this really matter in a world where people basically Google every business anyways to get to the homepage? I feel like everyone around me will Google whenever they hear about a cool app, website, store, product etc. or we're charting online or talking on Zoom and they'll just send me the link directly I'm not sure what the purpose of a URL is anymore... unless you're this guy [1] [1]: https://www.deepsouthve…

>I feel like everyone around me

It’s called confirmation bias.

Once you start exploring outside your circle, it might not hold true.

Re: Domains for the Rest of Us

#202

Post by dgellow » Tue, Sep 22, 2020, 12:09 PM UTC

jp555 wrote: post #152

palad1n wrote: post #133

Yeah, I used to speculate in domain names, and the ones that are coming up remind me of the crap ones I used to register before I knew what I was doing. Every once in a while you come up with unused ones that really stick out (like I remember there was "atomictangerine.com"), but otherwise I would recommend trying something more recognizable in a different tld (like "helloworld.blue" or something—there are a lot thes…

In your experience of speculating, have you come across any data about the frequency of people actually typing out domain names? I seem to be typing them less and less over time. Are we headed towards a business phone number 515-555-5555.com being a totally sufficient unique domain name? And then well why not just skip TLDs and share IP addresses?

It's the case in China, that's one the thing that I really didn't expect when I went there, you had giant ads on building with 2038-232-423.cn (that's just random numbers, but you get the idea).

Re: Domains for the Rest of Us

#203

Post by rovr138 » Tue, Sep 22, 2020, 12:11 PM UTC

lukeholder wrote: post #199

fun... #!/bin/bash while : do curl -s 'https://www.domainsfortherestofus.com/' | pup '.domain-name text{}' >> domains.txt done

Hadn’t seen pup before... nice

https://github.com/EricChiang/pup

Re: Domains for the Rest of Us

#204

Post by dgellow » Tue, Sep 22, 2020, 12:11 PM UTC

dwrodri wrote: post #26

Very curious to hear about the training set for these. If I had to guess, someone scraped GoDaddy/Google Domains/Namecheap for the "premium domains" that are being squatted on and then trained a language model on that corpus. Hopefully the OP can provide details!

It may be based on https://www.thisworddoesnotexist.com/ ?

Re: Domains for the Rest of Us

#205

Post by trengorilla » Tue, Sep 22, 2020, 12:54 PM UTC

ramraj07 wrote: post #39

If anyone still wants a simple cool TLD .com, try out names with hyphens. They're almost completely unexplored and I personally see no downside (except typing the domain in a mobile keyboard but who types domains anyways).

Hyphenated domain names are awful.

Re: Domains for the Rest of Us

#206

Post by ralmeida » Tue, Sep 22, 2020, 10:54 PM UTC

dgellow wrote: post #202

jp555 wrote: post #152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In your experience of speculating, have you come across any data about the frequency of people actually typing out domain names? I seem to be typing them less and less over time. Are we headed towards a business phone number 515-555-5555.com being a totally sufficient unique domain name? And then well why not just skip TLDs and share IP addresses?

It's the case in China, that's one the thing that I really didn't expect when I went there, you had giant ads on building with 2038-232-423.cn (that's just random numbers, but you get the idea).

I’ve never been to China, but it appears numbers are chosen over letters for ease of memorization, and are not always random digits: https://gizmodo.com/why-do-chinese-urls-use-numbers-not-lett...

Re: Domains for the Rest of Us

#207

Post by quadrangle » Wed, Sep 30, 2020, 1:26 AM UTC

albertshin wrote: post #53

quadrangle wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

huge downside: you have to say the hyphen explicitly out loud, and if a site exists without the hyphen, you'll get lots of mistakes. Are you thinking that everyone only gets to sites from actual hyperlinks rather than via human speech?

but does this really matter in a world where people basically Google every business anyways to get to the homepage? I feel like everyone around me will Google whenever they hear about a cool app, website, store, product etc. or we're charting online or talking on Zoom and they'll just send me the link directly I'm not sure what the purpose of a URL is anymore... unless you're this guy [1] [1]: https://www.deepsouthve…

the argument of "everyone will Google" might as well suggest there's no reason for .com even. You could just assume the address is completely irrelevant. As long as Google knows that "Flameswipe" should go to flame-swi.pe it's fine.

As others emphasized, besides people not always using Google, it's a tragic short-term idea to defer your traffic to a search engine and all their power. You really should want people to go directly to you and not to any middle-man.