I thought it would be interesting to see how many websites Google has indexed for a variety of “vanity” tlds. Although some of the tlds I searched include ccTLDs, I figure much of the usage is by people who are not using them for geotargeted local websites.
To get the results below, I did a Google search for “site:.tld” and the numbers are reported. Clearly there are far more results than domain names registered, so it’s likely that many of the results are for subdomains. It’s not scientific by any stretch, but it’s interesting to compare the number of indexed sites in Google.
- .ME – 633,000,000 results
- .TV – 588,000,000 results
- .CO – 267,000,000 results
- .MOBI – 245,000,000 results
- .WS – 149,000,000 results
- .NAME – 36,100,000 results
- .TRAVEL – 22,800,000 results
- .LY – 9,710,000 results
- .XXX – 5,410,000 results
Something else that is interesting and somewhat related is how little respect the major search engines give the ‘other’ domain extensions. Just a quick search on a few competitive search terms provides the following for Google search results:
Top 10 Search Results (on my computer using Firefox)
Insurance
8 com sites
2 org sites
Web hosting
8 com sites
2 org sites
Domain Registration
10 com sites
Data Recovery
9 com sites
1 org site
Cell phones
9 com sites
1 org site
Online dating
9 com sites
1 org site
Maybe this will change over time, but I am not sure….
site: also returns pages on a domain, so that’s why the number is much larger than the number of reg’d domains.
I got:
site:*.
me 275,000,000
tv 25,900,000
mobi 8,020,000
name 7,790,000
ws 6,840,000
co 5,660,000
travel 5,490,000
ly 204,000
Search with an, “*,” in front of the dot extension. Google must index each, “page,” calling it, “site” in the results. I can hardly believe the number of dot me pages! Would have thought one of the other extensions would have trumped dot me, such as dot tv. Dot co barely edged out dot name on your list, above. 🙂
do you think the number of registered .mobi will increase as more mobile sites are build?
@ Adi
I don’t see a reason why that would happen. You can create a mobile specific website on any domain name and you can detect when a mobile browser visits to ensure the correct site is displayed.
That’s true if you already have a good domain but what about if you are in the market of building a “next gen” mobile site and all the good .com are taking.
I myself am building a few sites for smart phones only and couldn’t find the fitting .com so I went with a nice .mobi
I guess time will tell.