Why everything you think you know about DNS is entirely wrong

And by DNS I mean, of course, Domain Naming Strategy. Like you know, the art and craft of choosing good, valuable, strategicⁱ domain names. Oh, you thought I meant something else ? Ha-ha! The joke's on you! Made you click! See how strategic I am ?

Anyway, take this thing :

We have noticed that you own a domain name relative to ours. We are currently thinking about putting our domain name BlogAboutBitcoin.com for sale. Please let us know if you might be interested in buying this domain name from us.

The current wisdom in the "DNS" crowd is that this'd be a great domain, because it has great words in it, and that blog, about and bitcoin are great words. In thatⁱⁱ order.

There are two major problems with this approach. One major problem with this approach is that the various web indexing services do not greedy regex the domain for the dictionary. Or, in common parlance, google doesn't try to play scrabble with your freaking domain. If it did, song.com would be pretty great because it contains on AND son on top of song. Wtf broken mental pipes are these!

The other major problem with this approach is that pretty much the only remaining utility of a domain name these days is the type-in, and type-in is almost ubiquitously supported by some sort of autocomplete. Which works on the basis of a list, populated by previous tries. Which makes anything starting in "blog" pretty retarded, albeit not nearly as retarded as anything starting in "bitcoin" (or, for that matter, coin). This is why qlockchain.info is a good domain name and bitcoincharts.com is a bad domain name : to type the first one i need to type ql, because nobody under the Sun has yet used a domain that starts in ql. On many systems I can get away with just typing q. To type the second one however I'd have to type "bitcoinc". That's 8 letters instead of 1.5, or roughly FIVE TIMES AS EXPENSIVE.

To sum up and also tl;dr : nobody cares what words are in your domain. What matters is for the first couple of letters to be a rare combo. Twitter.com is a great domain not because there exists a large population of twitters in the wild, but because exactly the contrary : "tw" is never ever used.

So, to pick a great domain : forget blog, about, derpyherp. Two letters, both consonants, preferably unpronounceable. The rest doesn't matter.

1. I think little annoys me more in the current fashion of using words as if they were soup ingredients than the co-opting of the word "strategy" by worm-brained twentysomethings. You're not "strategic", yo, and you have no strategy.

   It's not fucking juju, enough with this Africanisation of the West. We have a great culture and a great tradition, just because you're obviously too lazy and probably too stupid to grok it does not make your fucking idolatry equivalent. It's not in any sense equivalent, it's ludicrous, that's what it is. [↩]

2. You'd perhaps expect thinking to follow the correct flow of causality : A, B and C are great and therefore ABC is great too. What we're dealing with here, however, isn't thinking in any sense. It's dreaming. Consequently, it follows the order of dreams, which is exactly like so : "I went to the door because there was a ring but it wasn't coming from the door but from this octopus on the shelf which was out of water because in the water there's fishes and the fish that was in the water suddenly puffed up and was a sun colored orange which I begun peeling but there was a girl inside and she opened up her legs wherein there was the octopus and it was ringing." You know, definitely not the alarm or anything. Much "better explanation" like this, or in the words of the forum, "it’s impossible to call it one way or the other".

   Got any updates ? [↩]