Dateline: 1:35 pm, September 14th, 1997

Two young entrepreneurs are discussing their plans.

Larry: “What should we call our search engine?”

Sergey: “I like Google. It’s a play on googol. Clever, huh?”

Larry: “Yes, but it’s not very descriptive and I think if we use lots of keywords in our domain, it will do better in Yahoo, Excite, Lycos, Alta Vista, and AOL”

Sergey: “So what do you want to call it instead?”

Larry: “I’m thinking www.best-search-engine.com”

Sergey: “Why all the hyphens?”

Larry: “The hyphens act as stops. It lets the search engines read it clearly as three different words. Cool, huh?”

Sergey: “So it really makes that much of a difference?”

Larry: “Oh yeah. Using keywords in your domain name can mean the difference between being stuck at number 6 in the search results to maybe going all the way up to number 5 or even 4. All things being equal of course.”

Sergey: “Ok, let’s do it”

And so “Best Search Engine Inc” was born. Though the technology was good, consumers just couldn’t tell them apart from all the me-to companies that sprouted up. They easily confused them with www.the-best-search-engine.com, www.my-search-engine.com, www.top-search-engine.com and www.great-search-engine.com.

Two years later Sergey calls up his friend Julie Wainwright at www.pets.com and asks for advice.

“Dude, what should we do?” asked Sergey “we can’t differentiate ourselves from our competitors because of our lame-ass generic name.”

“I feel ya bro!” replied Julie, “we made the same fucking mistake. Even the million dollar Super Bowl sock puppet ad couldn’t save us. I kept saying no, that’s petstore.com or no, that’s petsmart.com or no, that’s petopia.com or no, no, no that’s petco.com! Jesus it was totally insane trying to establish the brand. Plus we lost money on every sale due to eating the cost of shipping. You know how much cat litter weights? If  it says five pounds on the bag… it fucking weighs five pounds! We could ship by mule and still lose money!”

“So what should we do?”

“Do you have any offers?”

“Well Yahoo wants our technology. They’re offering $1.5 million in a cash and stock deal”

“Dude, take it and bail that sinking ship! We waited too long and now we’re facing bankruptcy. Big mistake.”

“Ok, thanks Julie!”

So in on October 12th 1999, Sergey and Larry sold their company to Yahoo for a reported 1.5 million cash and stock deal. Contractually, Larry and Sergey were required to stay on for another year. Unfortunately, the market crashed on March 10th 2000, leaving them with a pile of mostly worthless stock.

And all because they picked a lame ass domain name.