Websites with names like DOCTORS.COM or RECIPES.COM: do you automatically think they are better than their counterparts, or that they were simply faster in getting the domain name?

I’d say they were first in getting to the domain name. I don’t know about Doctors.com but sites like recipes.com don’t actually do anything except send a search off somewhere else and show the results. And that’s pretty much how I feel about all sites until I actually look at them.

I have not used either site. So, I figure they were just faster at getting the domain name. I do love allrecipes.com though.

Neither. It means they were dedicated enough to buy the domain name from whoever had it first. Domain names are commodities. They are not permanent ownerships. They can be and are bought and sold.

The latter. I do not think that they are better than their counterparts. For recipes, for example, I tend to start with The Food Network.

On balance, it seems to me that site with obvious names (which were acquired back in the original internet bubble) are generally poorer than more recent sites. I believe this is the case because theses sites were created when the technology was a lot more immature and many have not updated to the latest web technologies. Many also failed and have just become ad farms and do not offer a modern social media experience.

I was just using those as examples, after finding a recipe on cooks.com which made me think of this question. Thanks for your answers, I especially like @gmander ‘s explanation.

Picking what domain names to buy requires a different skillset than whatever domain name you pick if that’s what you mean. Any marketing dipwad can choose a catchy name and try to register it, and the quicker ones can actually beat the others to the punch, but a maketroid isn’t necessarily a good chef/surgeon/mechanic or anything other than a shmuck with a bit of sales skills and quick reflexes.

So no, I don’t think that those are bettter, and in fact they are often worse than what you will find from people who spent more time learning teh skills and figuring out what to post than they did about finding and registering a catchy domain name.

No. I normally assume they’re just going to spam me.

I tend to suspect the site is old and out dated. If a site has a 1 word dot com name, part of me assumes the name was registered back in the 90’s when names were easy to find. It could be that the site is old and therefore well established, but I usually just suspect it will be and old dated site.

Im quite sure that in the late 90’s, someone sat down with a dictionary and registered every single last 1 worded dot com domain.

If you have a 1 worded domain, I will assume it’s an old site, or a new company with millions and millions of dollars behind them.

I recall several years ago someone sold the rights to the name eBusiness dot com for an obscene amount of money. It struck me as odd that the “e” on it made it more valuable.
The person who sold it simply registered it first, and waited on his goldmine.

I go more by how the site looks, and ease of use, than the site name. If it is a medical oriented site, I care much more about who is posting the information. If it is recipes, I could care less who is posting the recipe, if it sounds yummy I’ll try it.