The Domainator
Category: Internet...
Posted Saturday, June 02, 2007 at 08:01 AM [GMT-6]

One of the Gazette's valued readers, Larry Stephey, emailed the following to me:

Interesting question, and after exhaustive research (following two links after googling it) I can give this authoritative answer: yes. Sort of.

Domain names must follow certain standards, one of which is the length of the name in total (255 characters, including the top level domain [e.g. .com, .org, etc.]). In addition, the length of any subdivision – the stuff to the left of the dot, if there's only one, or the stuff between the dots if there's more than one – is limited to 63 characters. The unwieldy URL in Larry's example is thus maxed out (count 'em if you want, or just take my word for it) and thus it does qualify as being the longest it can be – along with 537 others.

See, there's this guy named Dennis Forbes, who seems to be a really bright fellow but who also obviously has a lot of time on his hands because in 2006 he analyzed around 50 million .com domain names and documented his findings.

He's actually discovered some pretty interesting stuff, such as the fact that the most popular length for a domain name is eleven characters, and 100% of the possible two- and three-letter domain names (presumably in the English language) have been registered. In addition, 100% of the top 10,000 family names listed in the federal census bureau's records have been registered.

He also enjoyed the analysis enough that he documented additional findings (complete with bubble charts!) such as the fact that more domain names start with the "s" than any other letter (and it's not because of s-e-x, either, so put that thought to rest right now), and while the most common starting digit is "1" and the second most common is "2," the third most common is not "3" but "4." Go figure.