Comments on: What Does Google “Knol” About Product Naming and Domains?

By: hennie meijer

hennie meijer — Fri, 01 Aug 2008 01:19:51 +0000

Seen on a forum:
“It was on the news here in Holland, TV, newspaper, online, everywhere
Google is offering Hilco Knol, the owner of Knol.com which is his familyname. for “5 zeros “. but he turned it down. He said, will consider offer only from “6 zeros”
He regged this name in 2002 for his shop which sells vacuum cleaners and stuff .
He lives in a small city called Dordrecht, south of Rotterdam”

He stated in the tv-interview that he reckoned that building up his name in the past(marketing costs) did cost him a 5 zero amount number already.

By: M. Menius

M. Menius — Mon, 28 Jul 2008 21:00:48 +0000

Geesh! “Knowledge.info” is available at a decent price. What’s with “Knol”. Completely counter-intuitive.

By: Steve M

Steve M — Mon, 28 Jul 2008 20:59:16 +0000

…and to add to the “cool” naming problem/ confusion, the AP’s news report on it says it’s spelled “cuill” (though they were apparently wise enough to grab that “misspelling” [wow--misspelling a misspelling] and forward it to cuil.com

By: Andrew

Andrew — Mon, 28 Jul 2008 20:12:07 +0000

Matt - I saw that over at ElliotsBlog. Crazy.

By: matt

matt — Mon, 28 Jul 2008 20:05:04 +0000

And now former Google employees are off to a rocky start with their domain choice. Their new search engine is located at Cuil.com, pronounced “cool”.

By: Andrew

Andrew — Mon, 28 Jul 2008 19:35:02 +0000

Thanks for the info. They’ll get some free press and inbound links, but it’s highly untargeted traffic. Much like utube, it’s probably more of a nuisance than a help.

By: hennie meijer

hennie meijer — Mon, 28 Jul 2008 18:36:17 +0000

Jan en alleman stands for everybody(degrading), basicly it says they got requests to sell the site from many different people.(maybe you should suggest to them to put it up for auction and let google pay double of the highest bid)

Apart from leaving a note to google on the website, thanking them for the attention they received , the company now also thanks all kind of websites and bloggers reporting about the story, which also brought them extra traffic.(who knows domainnamewire may get mentioned next time you look).

The company is only active in The Netherlands and Belgium and the website is in Dutch only, traffic from 130 countries seems like a bit of waste for the time being.
They kind of acknowledge this by mentioning on one of their web pages that especially the domain got a lot of attention and not so much their products.There is no mention of them looking for agents in other countries either.
They may be planning all kinds of thing though,who knows.
Maybe they are just holding out for google to make an offer.

Apart from knol.com the company owns knol.nl as well.
Knol is a pretty common family name in the Netherlands(and Belgium, a Belgian family owns knol.be)

Wondering whether they could not make an effort to put up an English version of the site as well.