www.[Noun].com


Simple URLs seem to be rarely used. I recall when I first began to use the internet, and to search for something I would simply type www.[thingthati'mlookingfor].com. The inbuilt problem of this was that more often than not, the relevant site you're looking for has a different format. It could end with .net, .org, or it could be something like http://www.123rf.com/, which I never could have guessed was an awesome website for images like this: 


Some [noun].coms are useful and straightforward. Clearly they had first dibs at the dawn of the World Wide Web - http://www.cars.com/and http://www.hats.com/ get you handy info on cars and hats, respectively. Some are slightly surprising, like http://www.fruit.com/, but it still gets you to a solid web page. Me on the other hand? I had first dibs on ekarimbvundula.blogspot.com :-)

Alternatively, if you try typing http://www.spider.com/ or http://www.leg.com/, then you get - hmm, nowhere interesting. I remember when dead-end URLs would lead to a warning page that gives you the impression that you are stressing out the internet. 


Now, you're more likely to be automatically redirected elsewhere (http://www.biscuit.com/ sends you to www.querimax.com for no apparent reason), probably to a dull website with a list of links you may or may not want.

Fortunately, with the existence of search engines, a website doesn't need to have an obvious URL to be found by the masses. Take http://www.craigslist.org/ for example. It's name doesn't make it obvious that it's a site where ordinary people can make major transactions, from finding a social link to selling their automobile. If URLs were strictly content-descriptive, Craigslist would probably be mainly about "milk", "bread", and "take dog for walk"; Yahoo! would be filled with lunatics; Gmail may only allow you to send emails to people whose names begin with G... and users may need to purchase a fan cooler for their monitor to even consider using Hotmail at all..

Thanks to search engines, web creators can be creative about their sites, even to the level of poetry. I'm a fan of http://www.deviantart.com/, and for a bit of a laugh there is http://www.dotcom.com/. You can find these sites through more than just one keyword, because the search engines will focus on sifting through the content of the site, rather than the web addresses. 

Do you know any other sites whose URLs suit them perfectly? Or, on the other hand, sites where the URL and content have as much in common as a chimpanzee and the F3 key on your keyboard... 



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