I think Shakespeare put it best when he said “what’s in a name?” That question has taken on new life in the internet era but it puzzles me. The values of some .com domains soared in the 90s and there seems to be a resurgence of huge priced .com domain names being sold recently. Candy.com (just the domain) sold last year for 3 million according to TechCrunch and others have gone in the millions recently including toys.com and now sex.com, once purchased for 14 million, is now back on the market with a starting bid of 1 million. But I often wonder what the value truly is. Think about the sites you use on a regular basis, Google, Yahoo!, Facebook, Twitter, Flickr, YouTube, Craigslist, ebay, etc. the list goes on. None of these were interesting words prior to the company’s that made them. I was trying to think of any sites that I use that have a 1 word, million+ dollar domain. The only one I could come up with is boston.com. Certainly there are brands, like redsox.com, patriots.com and target.com but I hard a hard time coming up with many sites I use regularly that have a million+ dollar domain name. Sure, back in the 90s, during the pre-Google era (B.G. so to speak), one way to find information about dogs would be to put dogs.com in the browser. (I went to check dogs.com to find nothing is there. I’m sure someone will sell it for a few million someday.) Today, if you want to find information about dogs you would likely go to Google and type dogs or more likely something more specific. If I were starting a site about dogs, I certainly wouldn’t drop a few million on dogs.com but would absolutely take that money and put it into getting on to page 1 of Google.