On Wed, 16 Jan 2002, Richard Keeves wrote:

> > You people *just don't get it*; do you ?    People don't *randomly guess
> at names*. That's akin to randomly stabbing in the last 4 digits of a phone
> number, secure in the knowledge that your Aunty Beryl lives in town 'foo'
> and you know the first four digits that  belong to 'foo'.
> 
> 
> Firstly,  typing in a a generic name is NOT randomly guessing at it. Many
> users think of a topic and type in the word (a generic word) to see what
> they find.

It is *randomly guessing at a URL*. Yes, many users *do* think of a topic,
and type in a word: where they do this is in a search engine.
Demonstrably. (although it would be illegal of me to show you the proof).

> > They use search engines.  Search engines do not rely on domain names for
> ranking.
> >
> 
> Actually, many search engines do give extra rating to websites whose domain
> also matches the word being searched for.   As such, generic domain names
> can make up a valuable part of a marketing strategy.

What search engine(s) would that be ? Please quote name and the URL where
you found this information about the search engine: none of the search
engines I looked at (google, altavista, anzwers, amongst others) listed
the *domain name* as a search criterion (waves to David :)

I'm always happy to be educated: with evidence please. Evidence would
constitute a URL by the search engine owners, stating that the domain name
is a search criterion used by that search engine.

Regards,

Saliya