All the Good Ones Have Been Taken -- In Domain Names, Too
It's hardly secret knowledge, though perhaps only Dennis Forbes has seen it in all its glory.
There are roughly 47 million domain names that end with ".com," making that space the biggest and most prestigious piece of real estate on the Internet. Getting a URL listed as a dot-com involves, ultimately, checking in with a database at Verisign, the Mountain View, Calif., company that keeps tabs on the dot-com world, the way your state's DMV knows about which cars have which license plates.
If you know who at Verisign to ask, you can get the complete dot-com list. Mr. Forbes, an analyst at Vastardis Capital Services, a New York mutual-fund service company, got it and has since made a hobby of studying the list, something he does in his spare time. He has, in the process, become the world's pre-eminent domainologist.
His findings ought to be relevant to aspiring Web entrepreneurs everywhere. For the rest of us, they are an amusement. (Registering a dot-com domain costs around $9 a year. After the initial registration period is purchased, you have to re-register the name or risk losing it to someone else.)
Most people trying to do business online will tell you that the good domain names are already taken. Mr. Forbes's research proves them out. For example, for every possible two-character and three-character combination -- including both letters and numbers -- all possible domains are taken. Virtually all English words with four letters are claimed; those that aren't are usually contractions, and Web rules don't allow apostrophes.
All of the 1,000 most common English words have been snatched up. The word "a" appears more than any other, though most of the time, of course, it's just a letter in a longer word. The least-used common word is "consonant," Mr. Forbes says, which is in just 42 domains, including "consonantpain.com," which isn't a misspelling but a word game.
Mr. Forbes checked the U.S. Census Bureau's 1,219 most-common male names, the 2,841 most-common female names and the 10,000 most-common surnames; all were booked. Not only that, but when you link the top 300 first names with the top 300 last names, 89% of the resulting combinations are taken for male names and 84% for female ones.
Beyond single-letter words like "a," it's hard to say what is the most common word in all the URLs. It's the same for all short words that tend to be portions of other words. The most common word four letters or longer, though, is "home"; 719,000 domains have some sort of home in them. Given the economics of the Web, chances are that many of those involve refinancing: 114,700 URLs mention "mortgage," which is more than discuss "science," "nature" or "children."
Because you might be curious, "sex" appears in 257,000 domains. It may be tied to one of the most popular uses of the Web, but the word itself is only the 89th most-popular in dot-com domains. Incidentally, what is perhaps the naughtiest English word -- the one with four letters -- appears nearly 38,000 times.
So smutty is so much of the Web, that often the best way to figure out what a certain word might be doing in a domain is to think of the most indecent activity you could possibly imagine associated with that word. The word "imagine," for instance, appears in 3,700 URLs, one of which asks us to imagine a certain actress without her clothes.
Half of all domains are between nine and 15 characters long; the average length is 13. A domain can have, at most, 63 characters, and there are 550 such domains. In fact, some people have made a haiku-like art out of 63-character domain names.
"I hope you have a pen and paper handy cause this is a crazy long domain name man," says one. (Spaces have been added in the interest of readability.) "Did you know that you can only have sixty-three characters in a domain name?" asks another.
There are other oddities in this fringe world of hyperlong domains. For example, each of the 26 letters of the alphabet has a domain in which the letter is repeated 63 times until there is no room left.
While much has been made of domain names like business.com being bought and sold for millions of dollars, Mr. Forbes is dubious about the value of expensive domains. Most people now search for Web sites using a descriptive word or phrase, or else are introduced to a site by a friend or colleague who emails the URL. So, domains don't need to be short and snappy the way they had to be in the earliest days of the Web.
A large percentage of these domains don't even have working Web sites attached to them. So why do people bother to register them? Besides whimsy, Mr. Forbes credits a lingering spirit of bubble-era speculation -- however improbable it may be.
"Someone out there," he said, "is still hoping that someone will come along and form a corporation called uuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuu.com, and when that happens, they will be sitting on a gold mine and will reap the rewards."
“.com”域名新发现
尽管这不是什么秘密，但也许只有丹尼斯?福布斯(Dennis Forbes)见识了它的庐山真面目。
全球约有4,700万域名是以“.com”结尾的，因此“.com”成为了互联网上规模最庞大、也是声名最为显赫的域名空间。正如美国各州的机动车管理局(DMV)对汽车牌照了如指掌一样，Verisign公司的数据库里也记录了所有“.com”站点的URL地址。总部位于加利福尼亚州山景城的Verisign监控著互联网世界的一举一动。
如果你在Verisign找对了人，你可以看到带有“.com”的全部网址的清单。纽约共同基金服务公司Vastardis Capital Services的分析师福布斯就得到了全部名单，还饶有兴致地在业余时间加以研究。于是，他成了全球知名的域名专家。
福布斯的发现对全球各地满怀抱负的网络企业家们有一定价值，而对于其他人来说，这些发现也许只是消遣娱乐。（“.com”域名的注册费是每年9美元。注册期届满后，客户必须重新注册，否则域名可能会被他人抢注。）
大多数有意涉足网络业务的人都知道，好的域名早就被注册了。福布斯的研究也证实了这一点。例如，由两个和三个字符组成的所有可能的域名──包括字母和数字──都已被注册了。几乎所有由四个字母组成的英语单词也被注册掉了；未注册的通常是缩略词，而互联网规则是不允许用省略符号作域名的。
最为常见的1,000个英语单词已经全部被注册了。其中，单词“a”的出现频率最高，当然大多数时候它仅仅是作为单词中的一个字母出现的。福布斯指出，在这些单词中，最不常用的是“consonant”，只出现在42个域名中，如“consonantpain.com”，这可不是拼写错误，而是文字游戏。
福布斯接著又查看了美国人口普查局(U.S. Census Bureau)档案中最常见的1,219个男性名字、2,841个最常见的女性名字以及10,000个最常见的姓氏的使用情况，结果发现它们全部被注册为域名了。不仅如此，当他把最常用的300个名和姓连接起来时，发现89%的组合被作为男性的名字，84%的名字被作为女性的名字。
除了像“a”这样的由一个字母组成的单词以外，很难说哪个单词是网址中最常见的。那些常常在长单词中出现的短单词也是如此。在由4个或4个以上字母组成的单词中，“home”一词在网址中最为常见，有719,000个域名中包含了这个单词。考虑到网络的经济效用，许多网址都涉及到再融资，因此有114,700个域名中包含了“mortgage”（抵押贷款）一词，比“science”（科学），“nature”（自然）和“children”（孩子）更常见。
而“sex”（性）一词则出现在257,000个域名中，这可能与性话题在网络中的受欢迎程度有关，不过这个词本身在“.com”域名中的受欢迎程度仅列在第89位。
网络的世界真是阴暗啊，猜测某个单词在域名中的含义的最好办法也许就是想想与这个词相关的最下流的事情。例如，单词“imagine”出现在3,700个网址中，其中一个网站让大家想象一下某位女演员不穿衣服的样子。
有一半的域名长度是在9到15个字符之间的，平均长度为13个字符。一个域名最多可有63个字符，这样的域名有550个。有趣的是，一些人用63个字符创造出了俳句式的域名。
其中一个域名是“I hope you have a pen and paper handy cause this is a crazy long domain name man”（意为我希望你身边带著纸和笔，因为这个域名实在太长了），这里为了阅读方便，在单词之间中间添加了空格。另一个域名则问道，“Did you know that you can only have sixty-three characters in a domain name?”（意为你知道一个域名最多只能有63个字符吗？）。
超长域名的另类世界里还有别的希奇事。例如，26个英语字母分别有26个域名，每个字母在对应的域名中分别重复63次。
虽然通过买卖business.com这样的域名可以赚取了数百万美元，福布斯对这些昂贵域名的价值依然将信将疑。现在，多数人都是通过描述性词汇或词组来搜寻网址，或是通过朋友、同事发来的链接得知某个网站。因此，如今的域名大可不必像网络发展早期时那么短小精练。
在这些域名中，有相当一部分甚至没有与之相连的有实际内容的网站，那么人们为何还要费神注册域名呢？福布斯认为，除了人们的异想天开之外，一些人还想从中投机发财，也不管这种想法是多么地不现实－－这无疑是科技泡沫时代的后遗症。
福布斯说，有些人仍寄希望于别人会成立一家名为uuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuu.com的公司，到时候他们就能坐在金矿上等著收钱了。
Lee Gomes
