This weekend I was trying to look at a few new sites that have popped-up on some of the latest-and-greatest new gTLDs and I found a pretty big issue. First, I’m not trying to ring the alarm here, I’m sure this issue will be fixed but without a doubt it is an issue that new TLD owners and registries will have to work with.
Here’s the issue, and since I only have an iPhone this is the only mobile platform I’ve tested on. I’ll walk you through a few examples so you can try it for yourself.
Suppose you find-out about a cool new website that just popped up on bingo.guru, and since you’re a bingo nut you want to read all the awesome tips and tricks they have to share. So you fire up Safari on your iPhone and type in the URL bar, Bingo.guru…but instead of going to Bingo.guru (which is would do if you type in Bingo.com, Bingo.net, Bingo.org, Bingo.co, Bingo.me, etc.) it instead does a Google search for “bingo.guru.”
I did the same test with a few other TLDs and ran-into the same issue. For example I own Morgan.xyz which when I type into my browser on my desktop navigates to a Go Daddy parking page…but when I type it into Safari on my iPhone it does a Google search for “morgan.xyz” which has this as its first result:
Houston, we have a problem. My guess is that Apple is just playing catch-up but in the near-term it’s hard to ignore this given that over 50% of my traffic comes from mobile and the same is true for many people.
I’m interested to know if anyone has tried this on Android and if they are experiencing the same issue. On the plus side, the video of the dancing baby (also named Morgan) is pretty darn cute.
