Topic: second class domains - stats?

Hypothetical scenario ahead, not really hypothetical altogether as it's puzzled me on more than one occassion. Anyone have advice, hard stats, pompous opinions, anything...

Say the business name is "Foo Bar" but FOOBAR.COM is already taken, so they settle for FOO-BAR.COM, or FOOBAR.NET

Is there any published studies regarding the amount of views they're gong to miss due to the second class name? Barring published studies, what say ye Aylumnites? Anyone tracked this? Studied it? Looked into it? Thought about it?

Any ideas, thoughts or general knowledge/wisdom out there about the worth of the first class name (FOOBAR.COM for our hypothetical business)? What should the limit to your efforts be on obtaining that coveted name?

Jason

[This message has been edited by JKMabry (edited 08-14-2003).]

JKMabry: Technically I would imagine that hyphenated domains would get better search engine rankings for keywords in the domains but this seems to be less of an issues these days:
www.google.com/search?q=hyphens+%2Bin+domain+names

Its unclear how many people would go to foobar.com as a typo of foo-bar.com and from experience a good percentage of sites don't even exist so they'd be more likely to find a blank page.

It might also be that hyphenated sites are more memorable as they separate the words up.

I would imagine the small advantages and disadvantages of each method would offset each other so there is little difference (at least I hope so).

If the other site is a live and a competitor I wouldn't go for the domain but otherwise you could suggest a link swpa ('Are you looking for the other .......').

Sorry nothing concrete just a few ponderings

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Emps

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