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Dropbox Acquires The Domain Everyone Thought It Had: Dropbox.com

techcrunch.com

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Re: Dropbox Acquires The Domain Everyone Thought It Had: Dropbox.com

#12

Post by eli »

panic wrote: post #3

It's worth mentioning that the first hit for "dropbox.com" on Google is the actual site, "getdropbox.com". Many people navigate to a site by googling its URL then clicking the first link.

I doubt most people navigate that way. Sure, plenty of browsers will do a google search from the address bar but only if what you've typed doesn't resolve on its own.

Re: Dropbox Acquires The Domain Everyone Thought It Had: Dropbox.com

#13

Post by kyro »

ujjwalg wrote: post #6

It is unrelated to this post but, dropbox rocks. I have tried 4 different file sharing services but dropbox simplicity and efficiency beats them all.

Haha. You know, this must really be an amazing company. I have never used the product myself, but every time a post about Dropbox comes around, there are always at least a few comments of people just wanting to mention how much they love it, regardless of the actual submission topic.

Re: Dropbox Acquires The Domain Everyone Thought It Had: Dropbox.com

#16

Post by blasdel »

eli wrote: post #12
panic wrote: post #3

It's worth mentioning that the first hit for "dropbox.com" on Google is the actual site, "getdropbox.com". Many people navigate to a site by googling its URL then clicking the first link.

I doubt most people navigate that way. Sure, plenty of browsers will do a google search from the address bar but only if what you've typed doesn't resolve on its own.

You'd be surprised how far normal users will go out of their way to avoid the address box, often using comically complex routines.

Google is much more trustworthy than DNS -- it's essentially content-addressed.

Re: Dropbox Acquires The Domain Everyone Thought It Had: Dropbox.com

#17

Post by kyro »

blasdel wrote: post #16
eli wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I doubt most people navigate that way. Sure, plenty of browsers will do a google search from the address bar but only if what you've typed doesn't resolve on its own.

You'd be surprised how far normal users will go out of their way to avoid the address box, often using comically complex routines. Google is much more trustworthy than DNS -- it's essentially content-addressed.

Reminds me of the time I searched for 'Google' using my browser's Google search, and then clicked on the first result to get to Google to search for what I was looking for...

Re: Dropbox Acquires The Domain Everyone Thought It Had: Dropbox.com

#19

Post by there »

eli wrote: post #12
panic wrote: post #3

It's worth mentioning that the first hit for "dropbox.com" on Google is the actual site, "getdropbox.com". Many people navigate to a site by googling its URL then clicking the first link.

I doubt most people navigate that way. Sure, plenty of browsers will do a google search from the address bar but only if what you've typed doesn't resolve on its own.

here's a related story that i am reminded of: i had a customer complain that a survey form on their site was occasionally not working, according to their customers, which they learned by those customers filling out a feedback form on the company's site which then sent them an e-mail. this survey form was a special url that was printed on receipts they gave to customers.

after looking in the server logs and finding nothing strange that would explain why the survey is only occasionally not working (i still didn't have a concrete definition of what "not working" meant), i had the company talk to one of their customers to get more information. he forwarded me the feedback email generated from their website, which included the end user's ip, which i then looked in the logs for.

what i found was that the way the user got to the company's feedback page was by typing "www.theirdomain.com" into yahoo search, clicking on the first result, and then going to the feedback link from their site (the referrer of their initial visit was a search.yahoo.com query for the domain). only after typing "www.theirdomain.com/survey" into yahoo's search box, did i discover the root of the problem.

for whatever reason, yahoo wasn't returning any results for the specific "www.theirdomain.com/survey" query, despite the page being there for years and having proof of yahoo crawling the url many times in the logs. google would bring it up as the first result, as did every other search engine, but for some reason yahoo would just return a "couldn't find anything matching that" error, which the end user translated into "your company's survey page doesn't work". after telling the specific user to type the survey url into the box "at the top of the screen", it of course worked. every other customer complaining about the problem was doing the same thing, all because of yahoo.

Re: Dropbox Acquires The Domain Everyone Thought It Had: Dropbox.com

#20

Post by anurag »

From the PDF:

"21. Plaintiff has expended considerable time and effort promoting and advertising Dropbox, using DROPBOX as its brand name. To date, Plaintiff has spent in excess of $1 million dollars marketing the DROPBOX brand."

They have $1.5m in funding (according to CrunchBase), and they've spent over a million dollars on marketing already? There has to be an interesting story in there somewhere.

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