Without clicking on them, can you tell which of the following domain names are real?
None of them should be real because: 1. They’re all incomprehensible; and 2. They were created by a random domain-name generator at this website run by a Danish free-lance graphic and interface designer, Joen Asmussen. And yet, 5 of these 10 nonsense words turn out to be actual web domain names: blobo, soso, hebos, qobo and omniana. (A six, the Google-typo-looking oogle redirects to a page masquerading as Google but which is actually part of something called Searching.com.)
I did this little experiment because it’s always struck me as odd how many websites have names that give no clue as to what they’re for. Think of xkcd (cartoons and stuff), Hulu (TV shows and movies), Miro (video player). I know I’m forgetting many others.
In class a few weeks ago I complimented Cory on the name Second Life because it gave me some idea what the thing was about. He told me that there was a huge fight over the name. A lot of people wanted something more random. He told me people choose fake words for their sites because they want to have something no one else is using and that they can build a unique identity around.
I think this is crazy. Why create a degree of separation between you and people understanding what you are? I think it’s got to do more with fashion than logic. I’m also guessing this practice started with Yahoo.
According to the company’s official history, Yahoo originated in 1994 as the hobby of two electrical engineering Ph.D. candidates at Stanford, David Filo and Jerry Yang. They wanted a guide to keep track of their personal interests on the Internet, but before long they were spending more time on their home-brewed lists of favorite links than on their doctoral dissertations.
Eventually, their lists became too long and unwieldy, and they broke them out into categories. When the categories became too full, they developed subcategories ... and the core concept behind Yahoo! was born.
The Web site started out as “Jerry and David's Guide to the World Wide Web” but eventually it received a new moniker with the help of a dictionary. The name Yahoo! is an acronym for "Yet Another Hierarchical Officious Oracle," but Filo and Yang insist they selected the name because they liked the general definition of a yahoo: "rude, unsophisticated, uncouth."
Google, the baby-talk-sounding search engine, got its name from googol, which is a math term for 10 to the 100th -- that is, the digit 1 followed by one hundred zeroes. According to an answer I found online, googol was coined in 1938 by 9-year-old Milton Sirotta, nephew of American mathematician Edward Kasner. In the doctoral thesis of Sergey Brin and Lawrence Page (the founders of Google.), they state: “We chose our system name, Google, because it is a common spelling of googol, or 10100 and fits well with our goal of building very large-scale search engines.”
The lesson of Yahoo and Google may be that when you have something that works, or when you’re first to market, it doesn’t matter what you call it. If gasoline were called zippetybipbop we’d still pump it into our cars.
But enough curmudgeoning for the week.
While searching, without success, for someone’s rating of the most incomprehensible real domain names, I came across this posting, pasted in below, on a chat site called Fazed.org. This is someone’s idea of the 10 worst website names ever. You’ll get a chuckle out of the URLs.
1. A site called " Who Represents" where you can find the name of the agent that represents a performer. Its name is:
- Experts Exchange, a knowledge base where programmers can exchange advice and views is at:
http://www.expertsexchange.com - Looking for a pen? Look no further than Pen Island at:
http:// www.penisland.net - Need a therapist? Try Therapist Finder at:
http://www.therapistfinder.com - Need a generator? There' s the Italian Power Generator company at:
http://www.powergenitalia.com - Looking for a hard-to-find flower or shrubbery? We have the Mole Station Native Nursery, based in New South Wales at: http://www.molestationnursery.com
- If you're looking for computer software, there's always:
http://www.ipanywhere.com - Are you living in Cumming , Georgia, and looking for a Methodist Church to attend? Well, look no further than the First Cumming Methodist Church at: http://www.cummingfirst.com
- Are you looking for a fast Art Director for your Video or Film Production? Then go check out Nigel Talamo's work at: http://www.speedofart.com
- Would you like a vacation at Lake Tahoe? Check out the brochure website at:
http://www.gotahoe.com
3 comments:
Clever post.
I think the "nonsense" naming of clients comes from a desire to completely define a word, and thus stand out from the crowd.
Seth Godin (sethgodin.typepad.com) has written on this, and interesting he comes out of Yoyodyne, which I believe helped with the early Yahoo! branding/naming, etc.
VERY clever and unique, and downright funny. This is good stuff, and it makes one think, how can I figure out something that clever and place a site there?
Stumbled, subscribed, ah hell, you got me at power-genitalia.
lol
love your blog Ed.
would like to add to your list of domains that do not tell you anything about what the company does.
http://www.megastarmedia.com
we build social networks.
;)
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