Yesterday I had a request to set up some hosting by a friend of mine. He does some small web design projects for local businesses and regularly asks for a small dollop of space to host the sites.
Once in a while you come across a great example of someone not understanding how the web works, and when he told me the domain that this newest client wanted to host, I couldn’t help but cringe at the address they’d picked.
The domain starts http://www.a12one … (I’ll leave the rest out to spare their identity), and despite my friend’s explanations that the logic was faulted, the client had come to believe that, because it starts with ‘a1’, it will appear at the top of Google searches.
Ah if only. I think you would find if that we’re the case. Being A A J Higgs it would have tangible advantages for me. Needless to say, I can’t really see it happening, although it would be quite amusing soul destroying to have to press the ‘o’ in Gooooooooooooogle approximately 24 billion times to get somewhere near the Zs pages. Poor Xerox, Yellow Pages and Zoo Magazine; they wouldn’t fare well.
As an additional punch to the groin, I have a feeling that mixing letters with numbers might cause a migraine like headache when recalling the aforementioned address. It could only have been ‘improved’ upon by inserting hypens at every available opportunity.
To be fair to that company, that technique used to be quite beneficial in the old days of paper directories. That was why you’d have so many companies spring up in the 80s and 90s called “A1 Taxis” or “A1 Plumbing” – it wasn’t for the quality of the service (although that would have been an added benefit to the name to sell you service) but to get high in the listings of directories.
Imagine the uproar though if the likes of Google and Yahoo! started listing sevices alphabetically, especially with all the strange Web 2.0 names and lack of available .coms.