Looking for that perfect domain name to launch a business or a personal website, but can’t find a suitable name currently available for lease? You may have Marchex, Seattle-based media company, to blame.
Louise Story, writing on the NYT’s tech blog, Bits, reveals that Marchex owns 200,000 domain names, 100,000 of which were acquired two years ago from Yun Ye, a software developer in California for $164 million.
Until now these pages have been filled only with ads. Now for 110,000 of the sites, the company will add listings of local merchants it has found by crawling and copying information from other Web sites. Someone looking for a veterinarian in San Francisco, for example, can find information focused solely on that topic at Marchex’s site www.sanfranciscoveterinarians.com. The niche sites summarize their findings from around the Web and link to those other sites.
“We see search technology as publishing, as creating new kinds of content that didn’t exist before,” said Matthew Berk, lead search architect for Marchex, which runs the sites through a subsidiary called Open List.
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