Google Announces Hire; Not Using .Google TLD

Google recently launched Hire, which is, according to TechCrunch, “a new service that helps businesses more effectively manage their internal recruiting process.” After reading the headline on TechMeMe and clicking through to the TechCrunch article, I was very curious about the domain name that Google chose to use for this new service.

As I read through the article to learn about Hire, I wondered if Google had acquired the Hire.com domain name. I also thought that perhaps the company might use its Google-branded TLD for it – Hire.Google. Neither of those options were used by Google. Instead, the company is using Hire.Google.com for this new service.

It sort of makes sense that Google wouldn’t go out and buy Hire.com. It looks like Hire.com is registered to a company called Authoria, Inc. Hire.com currently forwards to PeopleFluent.com, which appears to be how the entity rebranded in 2011. I am not sure if the registrant of Hire.com would sell Hire.com, but if the company was open to selling this domain name, my guess is that it would have a six figure or possibly a seven figure price tag.

The other option I thought about would have been Hire.Google. People in the new gTLD space have talked about Google’s usage of its .Google branded extension and highlighted it as a use case for dot brands. Not only has Google not used Hire.Google for the service, but if you visit Hire.Google, that domain name doesn’t even forward to Hire.Google.com. In fact, a Whis search at DomainTools shows that “This domain is not registered.” I presume there would be little to no type in traffic on Hire.Google, but there would be a very minute cost to set up this forwarding to at least show some interest in the .Google domain name.

I am sure there are examples of Google using its .Google domain extension. For instance, Registry.Google is Google’s domain registry website. However, from my vantage point, Hire being launched on Hire.Google.com instead of Hire.Google, shows me that it does not seem like there is any type of company initiative or mandate to use a .Google web address for new products or services. I would imagine that if Google thought its .Google extension was the future (as I have heard some people in the domain industry say), I presume the company would launch new initiatives on .Google domain names rather that Google.com subdomain names.

Elliot Silver
Elliot Silver
About The Author: Elliot Silver is an Internet entrepreneur and publisher of DomainInvesting.com. Elliot is also the founder and President of Top Notch Domains, LLC, a company that has closed eight figures in deals. Please read the DomainInvesting.com Terms of Use page for additional information about the publisher, website comment policy, disclosures, and conflicts of interest. Reach out to Elliot: Twitter | Facebook | LinkedIn

9 COMMENTS

  1. It does seem logical to me that Google would use a domain on .Google when they launched a new service or product. Google obviously doesn’t have a priority to move over to .Google.

    But I do think that it’s probably more of an issue of departments within Google acting on their own, operating like smaller companies that don’t talk to each other. I bet if you asked the people who are running Hire Google, it didn’t occur to them to launch on hire.google. If it had occurred to them to actually use hire.google, then they would have set up a 301 redirect from hire.google to hire.google.com.

    • I don’t disagree with you, but if would imagine if .Google was important to the company, when the Hire team called the IT and domain support team and asked them to set up the Hire subdomain, they would have been told about Hire.Google. I presume if Google corporate really cared about .Google, the IT team would have either mentioned or asked about .Google or it would have been on whatever form they needed to fill out to request adding Hire.Google.com.

    • That doesn’t make any sense. It would have been the same amount of tech work to use Hire.Google, but it would be more work to use one and rebrand as the other at a later date. Good try, but no.

      Perhaps they will try and buy Hire.com in the future, but the two options you mentioned make little sense to me.

  2. At 200k a pop of course nearly all the major tech brands would go for their .brand TLD. Peanuts for these heavyweights and essentially free money for ICANN.
    But it more and more shows that Brands have no intention at all to actually use their brand TLD but rather stick to .com.
    Another blow to to the whole program IMO.

  3. In my opinion Google doesn’t really care about domain names. They are their own portal for much of the internet’s traffic, through search, and have softened the market over the last ten years. I believe their interest in new gTLDs was a ruse/agreement with ICANN ex-president Fadi Chehadé to drum up major interest in them. I also believe their purchase of .app was a hedge of protection against future anti-trust litigation. Hence their corporate structure shift to Alphabet in order to make themselves less a liability to their shareholders in order to minimize potential European and American government sanctions. They are very smart and manipulative entity. Of course this is my opinion. 🙂

  4. Or it may just be as simple as being lower on the priority list and they will do a redirect later down the road. Some interesting conspiracy theories developing about it though. I wonder if that was their goal (Conspiracy Buzz). 🙂

  5. @Michael Anthony Castello

    Believe you’re spot on. Domains are probably way down on the lowest priority for this company. Google, like Apple, and Facebook, and Amazon, have their own ecosystems wherein domains have ONLY nominal value.
    There are exceptions: Gmail.com, icloud.com, iphone.com, etc

  6. Perceptions are important IMO Hire.Google is a mistake in the global context, definitively west – east. Hire (dot)com would stand or fall on it own competitive sword and would send the right message out to a democratic world [clients]. IMO Google shot themselves in the foot.

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