Raise your hand if you’ve ever had a flash of insight about a perfect domain name that is sure to bring instant success… …And keep your hand up if you’ve ever spent (wasted) a significant amount of time at your favorite registrar (mine) searching over and over until you find one that’s available. OK, if you’re hand’s not up, I know you’re lying :). The Google Story (thank you Pat Sullivan founder of ACT! for turning me on to the book) tells the story of the original search for Google.com When Larry Page and Sergey Brin decided that BackRub (the original name for their search engine) wasn’t going to cut it, they settled on Google, a “smaller” version of Googolplex (a very large number). The domain name was available, so Larry Page registered it and wrote it on the whiteboard: Google.com Someone else in the office came in and added ‘You misspelled it. It is supposed to be G-o-o-g-o-l.’ Googol.com had already been taken. Correct me if I’m wrong, but I don’t think Google has suffered from it’s “less-than-perfect” domain name. Appropriate thought was given, a decision was made, and an empire was built. I agree that BackRub needed to go. But I also believe that had the brainstorming conversation that night taken a slightly different course, the empire that we know today as Google could have easily carried a different name. Different name, different domain name perhaps, but it would have been the same great search capability, and had the same impact. The success isn’t in the domain name… the domain name just gets to be part of the success. And for all those small businesses out there angsting over finding just the right domain, let Google’s story be a lesson. P.S. Today, Googol.com is just a redirect to another site.