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).

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[edit] Structure

Typical domain names follow the structure of example.com, where example is the second-level domain and com is the top-level domain. A domain hack might take the form examp.le (where examp is the SLD and le is the TLD), but that particular one is impossible, since there is no .le TLD.

Variations such as examp.le, exam.ple and ex.am.ple are all possible structures used to create domain hacks depending on the available top-level domains. A domain hack can be composed of more than just a domain name, and also make use of the server's file structure as in ex.am/ple/.

The most popular and most sought after domain hacks are those that use only the SLD and TLD to construct the full title, as shown by the examp.le structure, above. However, a domain hack may use third-level domains, fourth-level domains, etc., and even directories/folders after the domain name to construct the title. For example the musical group Brave Combo's website is http://brave.com/bo/. More domain hacks are possible than one might assume due to the approximately 250 gTLDs and ccTLDs that exist all around the world.

Some TLDs only permit registrations at the third or higher level, beneath names that represent some grouping of sites; however, in some cases, these names spell words themselves, such as co.in or co.il.

[edit] 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.

[edit] History

On Monday, November 23, 1992, inter.net was registered and is thought to be the first domain hack ever (unverified). On Sunday, December 20, 1998, fami.ly was registered and is thought to be the first open-ended domain hack enabling others to prepend original name.fami.ly third-level domains to hack the hack (unverified). 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.

V3, a company founded in 1997 in the Netherlands and later acquired by the web hosting provider FortuneCity, provides a wide range of web banner financed domain hacks available for free to any user. For a brief time around 1999 these were very popular with amateur web pages for their novelty and availability values. Domains included start.at, come.to, listen.to etc. One of these is a common domain hack in Spain: pagina.de, translating roughly as "page.of", using the German [.de] top-level domain.

Yahoo! acquired blo.gs[1] on June 14, 2005, and del.icio.us[2] on December 9, 2005.

By the end of 2005, the registration of Spanish second level .es domains became widely unrestricted.

During the month of January 2006, Belgian domain names ending in .be were available for free for users in the USA and Europe; due to the common use of the word "be" in English, and the number of words ending in "be" (such as "tube"), this was a prime opportunity to easily register domain hacks.

British sitcom Nathan Barley by Chris Morris features a fictional website trashbat.co.ck (pronounced "trashbat dot cock"), a Cook Islands domain registered for deliberate profanity. In reality, the makers of the series registered the domain to promote the television series. It should be noted that Cook Islands charge $250 USD per year for non residents to acquire domains.

Former id Software programmer John Romero registered the domain name "rome" under the Romanian TLD .ro, thus getting rome.ro. James Reilly went one better by registering both the Spanish domain, jam.es, and the Libyan domain, reil.ly.

[edit] 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, means "naked". Likewise, Dutch, Swedish and Danish speakers sometimes use .nu, as it means 'now' in these languages.

Another French-speaking examples are teu.be, where "teube" can be translated by "dumb" or "dick" in English, jard.in (garden)...

German examples are Schokola.de (chocolate), Autom.at or fals.ch (wrong).

Some organisations situated in the Canton of Berne in Switzerland use the Belgian TLD .be to specifically refer to their canton.

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.

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.

[edit] Minor domain hacks

Domain hacks that do not use the TLD are sometimes referred as minor domain hacks[3][4].

An example minor domain hacks is http://3.141592653589793238462643383279502884197169399375105820974944592.com. This hack plays on the mathematical constant pi, and the page actually used to contain the first million decimal places of pi.

[edit] 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 www.delicious.com and delicio.us domain names which forward to their site.)

The other side of the coin is that domain hacks "eliminate" the local boundaries of an online presence. Making the website or online resource truly global and unique.

[edit] See also

[edit] Notes

  1. ^ Winstead, Jim. blo.gs: sold June 14, 2005.
  2. ^ Schachter, Joshua. del.icio.us: y.ah.oo! December 9, 2005.

[edit] External links

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  • Domain Hacks Suggest - 300,000+ domain hack suggestions (filtered by first letter, word length, and TLD)
  • Domain Brain - 63,324 domain hacks suggestions by country code using English language words.
  • Domain hunting - 220,000+ domain ideas (requires executing a Perl script to generate domain hack suggestions)
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