92466.com vs. 466453.com

The big news here on Jamptap, which has had a lame existence over the past year for no other reason than the big Internet companies have lacked the courage and ingenuity to try something new, is that Yahoo has apparently signed a lease with Worddial for 92466.com. WordDial bought 92466.com before Yahoo could. And this apparently pissed Yahoo off (when they found out) because Yahoo proceeded to buy every 92466 in every TLD around the world. When you typed in 92466.com on your mobile browser until this week, you were forwarded to the SEARCH (732724.com) page of WordDial, which provided links to Google, Motionbridge, Live search and others, but not Yahoo.

WordDial was smart. And Yahoo was holding out, but in the end knew that WordDial would never sell 92466.com to them. WordDial is a company based in New Zealand that owns over 1 million numeric domain names (dot coms) and has been developing a simple technology to allow easy access to information on the web using just the numbers on your phone keypad. They have little intention - although I can't be sure of this - of selling, since their business model is about 'content partnership,' which is a fancy term for charging fees to be included in a mobile directory listing. So...when I checked today, just days after the launch of Yahoo's new mobile search application, 'OneSearch,' there was one new link on the top of the list at 732724.com: Yahoo.

Brilliant. Yahoo knew that it needed to survive by at least matching Google at its mobile services, even if that meant paying whichever asking price for a content partnership agreement with WordDial.

So, where are the headlines? There aren't any and probably won't be any. This whole numeric domain thing has never had much success, yet. Google tried it in 2001 with their Google Number Search. Google's GNS was not used very much and so Google stopped updating a crucial part of their servers that link to GNS searches, which can still be performed if you type a series of numbers after allnum: or num: in Google. But Yahoo knows the wave of the future. Yahoo will never be a downloadable application that is menu-driven. Yahoo will always require the user to type in Yahoo in their browser. When it comes to cell phones, key-pad input is a big deal. It is cumbersome. But it is very easy to switch to number-mode and start pressing numbers, instead of multi-tapping to type out letters in a domain name. Thus, while Yahoo(.com) is 11 keypad taps, 92466(.com) is 5 presses. 466453.com is a 'savings' of 7 taps over Google.com. If you think of the millions of mobile users that will be accessing Google and Yahoo each day in the near future, they could be cutting their key pad entries in half using the numeric domains 466453.com, and 92466.com. A search engine that doesn't follow suit could lose customers for no other reason than it would take users an extra 5 or 6 keypad presses to get to that search engine's homepage.

So, the fight in the ring between Yahoo and Google is more vigorous than even it appears in the presses. Will both companies begin to advertise these numeric domain portals? Will other internet companies follow suit? Will domain speculators start buying up numeric domain names?