Domain hack
Domaining Guide
Domain hack
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A domain hack is an unconventional
domain name that combines domain labels, especially the
top-level domain (TLD), to spell out the full "name" or title of the
domain, making a kind of pun.
For example the
second-level domain (SLD)
blo.gs
makes use of the
TLD .gs (South Georgia and the South Sandwich Islands) to spell "blogs". The
third-level domains del.icio.us and cr.yp.to make use of the SLDs icio.us and
yp.to from the TLDs .us (United States) and .to (Tonga) to spell "delicious" and "crypto" respectively.
In this context, the "hack" represents a clever trick (as in programming),
not an exploit or break-in (as in security).
Shorter domain names
Domain hacks offer the ability to produce extremely short domain names. A
popular real world example is
blo.gs
with five letters total, versus the comparable blogs.com with eight letters or
the often preferred www.blogs.com with eleven letters. Domain hacks default to
the omission of the www. prefix, with the side effect of shortening the
domain name, as every letter is taken into account as the site's title.
History
On Monday, November 23, 1992, inter.net was registered [1]. On Friday, May 3,
2002, icio.us was registered to create del.icio.us, the most visited domain hack, with the prepending of the
"del" third-level domain.
Yahoo! acquired blo.gs[2] on June 14, 2005, and del.icio.us[3] on December 9,
2005.
Who.is is a
whois server, indicating the registered ownership information of a domain. It
was established June 12, 2002 and registered to an address in Reykjavík as the
.is extension is nominally Iceland.
Whocalled.us, a consumer-complaint site listing telephone numbers of known
telemarketers, was first registered in 2005.
Other languages
Domain hacks are by no means restricted to the English language.
Some years ago, a passing fad amongst French-speakers was to register their
names in the Niue TLD .nu, which led to
so-and-so.NU, which in French and Portuguese means "nude" or "naked"; however, as of 2007, Niue authorities
have revoked many of these domain names. Likewise, Dutch, Swedish and Danish
speakers sometimes use .nu, as it means 'now' in these languages.
Another French-speaking example is
teu.be, where "teube" can be translated by "dumb" or "dick" in English.
Louez.ça, which means «rent that», is a listing of rental properties in
Montréal, Canada.
German examples are
Schokola.de (chocolate),
Autom.at or
fals.ch (wrong).
Some organisations situated in Switzerland uses TLDs to specifically refer to
their canton (like the Belgian TLD .be for the Canton of Berne).
An Afrikaans example is
dieInter.net - "die" meaning "the" in English (The Internet). Email
addresses in this domain can then be expressed as "user at the internet".
A Portuguese example is
vai.lá, which is equivalent to the
go.to in English. Another is
notici.as, where «noticias» means "news".
In Russian, the
perevodov.net ("No translations") is a translation portal.
In Slovak,
rozbaľ.to ("Unpack it") is the home page of a prepaid Internet access
service.
In Slovenian, the
najdi.si ("Find it yourself") is a popular local search engine.
A
Gibraltarian example is
gibtele.com - The phone company in Gibraltar is called Gibtelecom and they
have used the .com to their advantage.
Criticisms
Using domain hacks weakens the usefulness of
country code TLDs. With domain hacks, it becomes harder to judge the country
of origin of a website by just looking at the TLD. Breaking up a domain name to
subdomains and/or the URL
pathname most often renders the actual domain name meaningless and breaks
against good naming conventions.
Some domain hacks are difficult to remember until you become familiar with
them, such as
del.icio.us. A common typo is to type the periods in the incorrect location.
(To counteract this, del.icio.us has also registered the
delicious.com and
delicio.us domain names which forward to their site.)
See also
Notes
-
^ Whois
domain search
[4]
-
^ Winstead,
Jim.
blo.gs: sold
June 14, 2005.
-
^ Schachter, Joshua.
del.icio.us: y.ah.oo!
December 9, 2005.
External links
- Searches
- Suggestions
-
Domain Hacks Suggest - 300,000+ domain hack suggestions (filtered by
first letter, word length, and TLD)
-
Domain hunting - 220,000+ domain ideas (requires executing a
Perl script to
generate domain hack suggestions)
- Articles
- Registration & Hosting
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Domaining Guide, made by MultiMedia | Websites for sale
This guide is licensed under the GNU
Free Documentation License. It uses material from the Wikipedia.
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