Hey Google, name my website
Google has launched its own website-naming service, Google Domains. It says it’s aimed at small businesses, 55 percent of which don’t have their own website, according to Google research.
Blake Newman, who runs a website design agency in Washington D.C., was one of the people invited to test out Google’s domain-name registration service before it went public. “It’s relatively sparse,” Newman says.
In other words, it’s Google style. And that’s the opposite of a lot of other domain-name registration websites, Newman says, which can be complicated –even for professionals like him.
Does that mean that other registrars like GoDaddy, eNom and Network Solutions should be worried? No, says Phil Corwin, head of the Internet Commerce Association, a lobbying group for the domain-name industry. Corwin was speaking from a domain-name registrars’ conference in Las Vegas, where he says Google wasn’t even the main topic.
“It’s a competitive space,” says Corwin. “And some of the smaller players, they’re not going for a mass market. They’re going for more of a niche market.”
For those 55 percent of small businesses without websites, Google is banking on simplicity trumping niche.
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