An international comparison
Disclaimer: This story has no intention of promoting chicken sales or to advertise the business of poulet.lu. This is merely about the simplicity of the relation between domain name and website: one word, six letters. Poulet (chicken) is the name, and selling chicken is what it’s all about.
Looking at this example from the .lu top level domain, you can’t help but wonder: what about other chicken websites from other countries? A word as universally known as “chicken”, must be a domain name that is highly sought-after in all corners of the world.
How about the most obvious entry: chicken.com
Strangely, apart from the picture, this site seems to have no real link to chicken at all. There is barely any information to begin with, apart from a search bar, which will lead you to… advertisements. All the stranger is the assumption that this domain is worth quite a lot of money, according to GoDaddy.com:
This evaluation is based on the fact that similar domains such as hotdog.com or cabbage.com sold for over 25.000 USD.
Moving on to a different part of the chicken web: Let’s have a look at hühnchen.de
Ther German version is trickier: there is no hähnchen.de, and chicken.de is also not a real website. However, the contents of hühnchen.de are also not really linked to selling chicken, but rather random products with the term “Hühnchen” in the title.
Looking at our other neighbours: the French poulet.fr is unavailable…
…and the Belgian poulet.be is for sale (possibly at a bargain price, compared to chicken.com):
Finally, the Dutch website kip.nl (the shortest URL so far), doesn’t show any content related to chicken YET, but promises to show “Everything you want to know about chicken, you can discover here (soon)”.
If you google “best chicken websites”, there is a large community of dedicated chicken fans, with blogs, instagram accounts and even an online “eggucation” center. None of which have names as clear and simple as “chicken.com”. As we have seen, the same goes in other languages.
One conclusion from this comparison could be that the shortest domains are often taken by people, or companies not really using them for useful or interesting websites, but rather to keep the name registered and reserved, until somebody comes along, who’s willing to pay a lot of money to get the right domain name.
For example, the domain purple.com was sold in 2017 to a mattress company for 900.000 USD.
This poses another nuisance to archiving the web, with thousands and thousands of registered domains, cramped with ads or no content at all. These sites are useless to regular users and clutter the capacities of web harvesting campaigns.
The Luxembourg Web Archive doesn’t discriminate based on the content of a website, where around 100.000 websites are captured on equal terms and settings during our domain crawls. However, we can decide to invest more into areas of the web, that we think deserve more attention and more regular captures. That is why suggestions and participation from website owners and users are so important, to better understand, map and capture all corners of the Luxembourg Web.