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An Appeal to Google: Make ".io" a gccTLD
- deleted 13y ago[deleted]
- dcc1 13y agoDid you have to spam my .io mailbox?
- Terretta 13y agoHad the same issue. Got a couple nice .io names for APIs, found they didn't cooperate with tools and ranked poorly, shelved them. Thanks for bringing this up.
- larsmak 13y ago"found they didn't cooperate with tools" ..interesting, care to elaborate?
- drdaeman 13y agoWhy appeal to Google? Appeal to ICANN and IANA.
- niggler 13y agoWhat does gccTLD stand for?
- arscan 13y agoGeneric Country Code Top Level Domains
- ajanuary 13y agoFrom TFA: > [Google] appear to have coined the gccTLD acronym, and that list of domains above is only reference by Google, so it would appear so.
- mhurron 13y agoThe article actually talks about this. The issue is how Google uses ccTLD's to decide on how to deliver search results to you.
- jvzr 13y agoI'd argue many TLDs present the same issue. I myself use the .es TLD (Spain) as a "novelty" domain name (geekeri.es), but Google won't treat its content as targeted towards international, and mainly english-speaking audience. It's a shame and I would have prefered Google had chosen to look at the language of the content instead of merely the TLD. Anyway, I like my domain name and wouldn't change it for a gold bullion.
- neya 13y agoDitto, same situation! Had I known this, I would have gone with an acceptably weird dot com..
- smcl 13y agoSimilar situation and I also don't mind - my novelty domain\site (http://taps.af http://taps.af) is an obscure reference to a Scottish phrase that was just a silly weekend project as a result of a drunken joke with some friends.
- nodata 13y agogccTLD = Generic Country Code Top Level Domains https://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=1347922 https://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en...
- StavrosK 13y agoThis is a complicated solution that will produce many false positives. The simpler solution would be to just give each customer a box in Webmaster Tools where they could select whether they wanted their domain (wherever that is) to be targeted generically.
- eli 13y agoFalse positives? Please correct me if I'm wrong but I can't find a single .io site that is actually intended just for residents of the British Indian Ocean Territories. Edit: Checking the NIC rules, actual IO residents with servers in the territory can use the reserved third level domains like foo.com.io. I still can't find any that actually exist.
- Hontano 13y agoIndeed there is no indigenous population and hasn't been since 1966 [1]. It's nothing but a strategically well-placed airbase with a few thousand personal and contractors. .io is clearly a gccTLD. The TLD administration and commissioner in charge of 'the government' reside in the UK. [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/British_Indian_Ocean_Territory#Depopulation http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/British_Indian_Ocean_Territory#...
- justincormack 13y agoThere is a population that would like to return home...
- Hontano 13y agoTrue. And the "marine reserve" shenanigans are disgraceful.
- RBerenguel 13y agoThat's a problem with users of .io domains, not with the system. Every time I see a .is domain that is just from some ego-driven developer (mygreatname.is or similar) I cringe, just like when I saw nyan.cat (cat is the top-level domain for Catalan and Catalonia and supposedly has stringent conditions for granting its use)
- Uchikoma 13y agoFlame me down, but this is what you get when you "misuse" .io.
- robotmay 13y agoBecause there are so many legitimate uses in the British Indian Ocean Territory. (as a note, nic.io actively want the domain used as people are indeed using it)
- UVB-76 13y agonic.io want to exploit the extension for profit, so obviously they will encourage wide usage, but ultimately what they have under their control is a ccTLD.
- Uchikoma 13y agoSo? Someone chose clay.io instead of claycorp.com or somethingelse.com, doesn't get found by Google and now wants Google to change the TLD to a gccTLD disregarding the locals.
- deleted 13y ago[deleted]
- fosap 13y agoIn defense of the current status: You are all misusing (or absuing) the DNS. Do you live in (or target) the British Indian Ocean Territory? No? Then this domain is not meant for you. This is a hack, and I don't like it. (For the same reason i don't like the new gTLDs) This sound a bit like a complain that reading Shakespeare in hexspeak is not very pleasant. /Edit: Sorry for beating a dead horse. I know TLDs are not used the way I think they should be used. But I think it was important to point out once again that this is a dirty hack. It works, but when working outside of the spec you should be aware of it a accept shortcomings. Not saying you should not ask google to route around it. But it has it limits. ".at" are meant for Austria and not for email providers, that's something they just should deal with.
- new299 13y agoI find it grating too. I thought this was an interesting point: "Generic top-level domains (gTLDs) don’t target specific countries. If your site has a generic top-level domain, such as .com, .org, or any of the domains listed below" I actually consider .com etc to be largely US based, particular as it appears they can be seized by the US government and are under US jurisdiction.
- srik 13y agoThe British Indian Ocean Territory does not have a "general population". It's a perfectly good waste of a short and meaningful TLD, which we already have a few of as it is.
- nwh 13y ago.io isn't the only one either. There's quite a few ccTLD for countries that don't exist, never existed, or have never had a permant population. I can't imagine Google does geographical targeting for the lesser used ones like .co.ck. (for the Cook Islands off Australia).
- RBerenguel 13y agoLooks like a useful TLD for some kind of websites
- sp8 13y agoPersonally I've been against the 'abuse' of the domain name system in this way (using ccTLDs as if they were gTLDs) for years, but the world disagrees with me. So at this point there seems little point in hanging on to geo-targeting by ccTLD, might as well flatten the playing field. But we do need some country-targeting and while we do have the Webmaster Tools thing (but that is only Google-specific, you'd end up having to do this for any and all search engines, if they offered it) I'd like to see control put back into the hands of the sites themselves, and have some way of tagging available in the HTML of the page. It'd also get rid of the ridiculous assumption that search engines make that if your site is hosted at an IP in a country, then that's the country that should be targeted in their results (if there are no other signals, ie ccTLD). Here in the UK there are many web hosts which are based in Ireland or Europe, and at the moment I worry that using them would hurt the site's reach into a UK search result.
- ScottWhigham 13y ago> I'd like to see control put back into the hands of the sites themselves, and have some way of tagging available in the HTML of the page. I'd like to think that, as a web dev/master/admin/whatever, I wouldn't have to tag each one of my thousands and thousands of pages with the exact same tag. This is just a tough approach - it would work for super small sites only IMO.
- sp8 13y agoPoint taken (though presumably you do tag other things about each page - language, direction of reading, cache length etc). Tagging each page would give you the ability to nominate that different sections of a site target different countries though? An alternative then might be something akin to robots.txt - place a geo.txt (or whatever) file in the root of a site to indicate its relevance to particular country or countries?
- ScottWhigham 13y agoYeah, something like that would be more ideal than the tags. That way you could do it at the folder/subdir level.
- Dirlewanger 13y agoWhy was this even originally selected by tech companies? Trendiness? Because they saw the .io standing for input/output?
- robotmay 13y agoIt's somewhat relevant (due to the input/output interpretation), not excessively expensive, and there are loads of great short domains available. I've got a few myself, my favourite being iso.io; which is for an in-progress photography site.
- thegrossman 13y agoWe chose it for forecast.io because of the input/output connotation. It is a concise way to imply "data service". .io also allows us to use a short descriptive domain name. If we went with a .com, we'd be stuck with either something like forecastweatherapp.com, or a made up nonsense domain -- in which case we'd be basing the name of our app on the specific domain we were able to acquire.
- coin 13y agoBut I/O is the communications between devices. forecast.io is mostly about using vast amounts of weather data and then processing it to forecast weather. What does that have to do with I/O? I'd take your company more seriously if you had a .com name. Your current name makes me envision a junky spam site. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Input/output http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Input/output
- glitchdout 13y agoThe current name makes me envision an edgy, cool site.
- eli 13y agoYes, but also and especially due to the lack of short, memorable .com names available.
- spindritf 13y ago.de is also used in many hacks, maybe even more popular than .io, and Google does not allow to change the geographic target for those domains in Webmaster Tools. Any idea why? Do they fear that this setting will be abused? Hope to hold the floodgate and have people use geographically "appropriate" TLDs?
- Svip 13y agoMaybe because .de is still pretty well used in Germany? And .de is still marketed as a German TLD, not a generic one (like, for instance, .io is). To get a .de domain, you must have an address in Germany, so it makes sense to consider it a German ccTLD.
- maaku 13y agoSo? You should still be able to tell Google: “Hey this .de domain? I'm using it market to an international audience, so don't hide me from the world. Kthx.”
- Svip 13y agoThen shouldn't that be the case for _every_ TLD? Then surely we shouldn't go on a TLD by TLD basis, when we should 'petition' Google for revising their country bias per TLD. Although, doesn't .de domains appear on Google.com given the right search (e.g. 'Der Spiegel')?
- dClauzel 13y ago.io has a normalized meaning. Accept it, or simply don't use it :)
- andyhmltn 13y agoKind of off topic, but I went to change my password for the IO NIC after reading this. Apparently they store it in plain text...
- gesman 13y agoWe need .js !!!
- elliottcarlson 13y agoWhy are people arguing over the misuse of the .io TLD? No one is saying not to use it - but if you misuse it, then you should understand the consequences. If you buy a domain in the .ly TLD and it gets removed for whatever reason, it's your fault. If you brick your iPhone while jailbreaking it, it is your fault. Go ahead and hack away, as is the spirit of everyone on this site - but don't think that it means everything will behave the way you expect it to.
- jakelazaroff 13y agoI don't see how .io is different from .fm or .ly or .amillionothercountryTLDsthatpeopleusefortechnicallyinappropriatereasons in this regard.
- Siecje 13y agoWhy does it matter which country a site is located? Seems like it would only be used for prejudice against certain countries.
- kevinburke 13y agoMost of the ten gccTLD's he mentions as being unpopular have, in the past, been associated with giant penalties in Google's rankings, especially .cc, .ws and .tk which hosted large amounts of spammy content for a really long time.
- eli 13y agoI've heard the same thing about .info but I have no idea if it's true.
- mwally 13y agoThis topic is especially sensitive to me, so please enjoy the enraged rant below. ----- I have a better proposal: STOP DOMAIN ABUSE! Remember, back in the day, when .net meant you were a network services provider, or when .org was only used by non-profit organizations. Wasn't that confusing as hell? What the hell happened? The network had a beautiful, well planned design, and PEOPLE LIKE YOU threw it away. YOU ARE THE PROBLEM, NOT GOOGLE. I recently had a conversation, with someone I respect greatly, about creating a series of informational sites very specific to US audiences, and he had a fit when I insisted on using the .us TLD. (Blasphemy, right?) He demanded I use .io, for a site that contained exclusively United States related information... Seriously? I will not participate in this madness, and the HN audience should know better. It's really simple, you see: your new project has lots of video content? Considering .TV? Is your company based in Tuvalu? THEN DON'T USE IT. .AM? That's Armenia .FM? Federated States of Micronesia .ME? Montenegro. The list goes on and on. Wikipedia has a complete list of them, along with their intended uses and common abuses. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Internet_top-level_domains http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Internet_top-level_doma... What makes this whole thing even more insane is that there are still tons of quality .us domain names, completely open for registration, and people insist on using TLDs of other random places! The Indian Ocean? Really? I want some of whatever everyone is smoking. "Only you can prevent domain abuse."
- signed0 13y agoRealistically, .us is never really going to see any real mass adoption by American businesses. The only time consumers encounter a .us domain is in a spam email. In all my time on the internet, I can only think of a single .us site that I visited that was real, and that site eventually moved to .com when it became available. It's the equivalent to opening up a store in the red light district.
- walshemj 13y agoNO .org was not just for nonprofits it was every thing else that didn't fit the other TLD's Some in the US non profit industry wanted to make it so retroactively when .org came up for renewal - but they got shot down in flames ( the red cross and Oxfam did not fit their narrow definition of a non profit for example) BTW I used to work for a registrar and this is direct from the guy who lead our bid to run .org
- dkulchenko 13y ago.io is now in the list. See http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=1347922 http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&....
- pyvek 13y agoWhoa. Didn't really expect Google to respond to this and that too so quickly!
- shenanigoat 13y agoUse .co There are plenty available. Google treats it as a GTLD and co is meaningful if you are using it for a company. It's also only around $15 for a registration. Some of those country codes have ridiculous prices.
- ronaldx 13y agoSo you've bought something deliberately because it's the cheap option that comes with a downside. And now you want to drop the downside. Maybe you'll even be successful, at least a little... good luck.
- macarthy12 13y agoLooks like it has been added : .fm .gg .io .la .me