When Big Al's bowling alley and
restaurant wanted a jaunty name for its website, I Love Big Al's seemed the
obvious choice.
It was only when the site was up and running that the
horrible truth dawned: run the words together and you might also attract
visitors looking for women who swing both ways — I Love Bi
Gals.
The business, in Vancouver, Washington state, is one of the
tamer entries in a new compendium of websites whose names seemed safe enough at
the time, but become somewhat unfortunate when strung together as a web
address.
With hindsight, the compilers of a list of celebrity agents
called Who Represents would probably have thought twice about calling their
website whorepresents.com.
And spare a thought for the Mole Station
nursery, a garden products company in New South Wales, Australia, whose web
address used to be molestationnursery. It has now been changed to the
not-at-all-amusing molerivernursery.
"In a world without spaces we
mentally insert our own," said Andy Geldman, a software designer and author of
Slurls: They Called Their Website What? "And you might not stick yours where I
stick mine."
His book lists over 150 such sites, anything from
American Scrap Metal (or americanscrapmetal) to ustinc.com. Website names have
inspired pranksters. At first glance you might think that Powergen, the energy
firm, had made a terrible error with the site of its Italian branch:
powergenitalia. Actually it has nothing to do with Powergen.
There is
also suspicion that Pen Island, a firm that apparently offers a range of bespoke
pens, knew exactly what it was doing when it named its website
penisland.net.
Geldman has coined the name Slurls for such
ambiguities, combining the words "slur" and "url", which means uniform resource
locator and is the technical term for an internet address.
Most
ambiguities prompt the response: what were they thinking? Log on to menlove.com
and you do not expect to find the site of a Toyota dealer in sleepy Utah.
Likewise, would you feel comfortable as a hotel owner renting bedlinen from
ladrape.co.uk? Yet this is the site of a Cheshire firm.
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