Domometer

Choosing a domain name is a tricky and stressful business, unless you're selling fake Ugg boots, in which case you've probably got a couple of hundred already. For the rest of us, though, how do we tell what's good and what's not?

Obviously, we'd want to pick a short title that's really easy to remember, so we'd choose just one or maybe two short, memorable words. And ideally they'd need to be common dictionary words, and ideally the dot-com should be available as that's the top of the top level domains and everyone has always wanted to get a dot-com rather than a dot-anything-else because that's what people think of. If I tell you to find the Disney website, for example, you're going to type disney.com even if you don't know for sure if it's a dot-com or not.

All of that is not obvious, though, to people who visit domometer.com, which invites you to type in your choice of domain name and returns a grading of A+ to F- for your troubles. It explains all the above, if you didn't already guess or know, and then adds an extra category for "distinctivity", a mystery something-ness that we may not be able to put a name to, but which singles out the best of the best from the also-rans.

Is this actually any use? Well, we can have some fun with it, anyway.

If you type in "distinctivity.com" you will be told that "distinctivity" is not a dictionary word (it is, but only barely; either way, the site loses: if it is, then they're wrong to say it isn't, and if it isn't, then they're wrong for labeling a category with it).

If you type in "domometer.com" it gets an A+, but if you instead try "modometer" it doesn't. Neither does dimometer, donometer, or midometer, or damometer, or madometer. The (in my opinion) more marketable "dormometer.com" gets an even lower score.

gooddomains.com gets a slightly worse score than baddomains.com. And to end:

"The domain name distinctivity.com has a very poor distinctivity factor"

So, does that help or not? When you get to the end of the page, there's a note that

"you can have extremenly (sic) popular websites with low Domometer grades. Ultimately what matters is the content on your website."

And that's true. Though there are really no ultimate truths in this game. Hyphens, for example, will always get marked down because (a) people don't remember them and (b) they're usually associated with scams of some sort. But look at how high up the ratings some of these hyphenated titles are. And how many people fall for the associated scams. And remember, people are clicking through from search engines, and bookmarking, and don't always need to remember whether there are hyphens or not. Nothing is certain.

Clever optimization of the site code can do a lot to make up for poorer content, not to mention cheating with the optimization, which for some reason, spammers always seem to be better at than anyone else. Search engines are getting better at not being fooled, but they're still fooled too often.

This is not a bad resource, but IMO not a great one, either. Though as it's collecting all the queries, unless users choose otherwise, it may well become more useful as time passes and the database builds. Ultimately, it tells you things you could have figured out for yourself, and until it can prove that it gets things right, it's not authoritative. If you're really stuck making a choice between several similar names, though, it may well help you make the best decision. Just bear in mind that buy-ugg-boots-cheap is a terrible domain name and don't go for that one, OK?