Of course, position on search engines is more and more dependent on that
fair and objective system of "the more you pay us, the higher we'll put you
in any search results".

I think that in this discussion there's far too much emphasis on the single
dimension of search engines and the domain name itself.  Without effective
and substantial complementary marketing, neither has much value or
relevance.  In our experience, consumers use search engines for research for
data, but they use the local yellow pages if they're looking for a business
to supply their needs at the time.

A website makes it easy to window-shop that business, but being in a search
engine isn't much of a help in finding that site.

To give an example, I looked in Google for "timber products", which resulted
in over 3Million hits.  "melbourne seafood restaurants" gave over 10 000
hits.  No consumer in their right mind is going to work their way through
that information overload.

At the end of the day, it's marketing that bestows value on a name.  The
name itself is a starting point for that marketing process.  If I want to
buy an exotic car, I don't go to Yahoo to look for "cars" - I go to the
yellow pages to find the nearest Ferrari dealer. (Which says that I don't
know one off hand :))

Ron Stark

-----Original Message-----
From: Saliya Wimalaratne [mailto:saliya§hinet.net.au]
Sent: Thursday, 17 January 2002 10:37 AM
To: 'dns§lists.auda.org.au'
Subject: RE: [DNS] thread.119


On Thu, 17 Jan 2002, Cooke, Tony wrote:

> Saliya
> 
> Try going to http://www.alltheweb.com/ and typing in "cars" or "real
estate"
> and see what comes up as the first hit.

Tony,

This isn't evidence of 'the domain name being used as a search ranking
criterion'. Just evidence of a URL coming up first.

Do the same search on the same site with 'foo'. Does 'www.foo.com' come up
first ?

My theorem is that the domain name is not used as a ranking criterion by
any (major) search engine.

To disprove this theorem, you simply need a statement from a search engine
author or owner, saying that the domain name itself is used as a ranking
criterion by 'x' search engine.

I haven't found one yet.

Quoting results from particular searches of course does not constitute
supporting evidence (a statistically representative sample might; but I
think that such a sample might require millions of separate searches and
be fairly labour- and network-intensive :). It would be far simpler to ask
the search engine owner/author.

Regards,

Saliya


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