Google is trying to make inroads into the China search engine market. To make the users reach its site quickly, it has obtained the shortest possible domain name in China,
http://g.cn, and previously users were able to reach it as google.cn.
Google announced today that it
purchased the domain name g.cn in China to make it the shortest possible domain name. It said this domain will make the users easy to find. Whether this domain name will be able to surpass the Baidu Search engine, we have to wait and see. When you type in g.cn, you will see the following picture just like the google.cn.
Currently
Baidu has
58.1% market share in searches in China, while Google has 22.8% but is rising compared to Baidu.
Though Google purchased this domain name in China, it couldn’t do the same in the US or in other countries. All the single letter and single digit names are reserved by the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority (IANA), which is the master arbiter of domain names and addresses on the Internet.
Other shortest domain names owned by major companies are Z.com owned by Nissan, Q.com owned by Qwest and X.com owned by PayPal.
IANA may auction of these single letter and single digit names at a later time, but for now they own the remaining single letters and digits domain names.
Google can buy single letter domain or infinite letters domain; they have the money to buy them. Currently Google
trades at $712 per share; they were $600 per share last month.
