Numerical Chinese website URLs

[Zhende ma?]

I was wondering if anyone could enlighten me on why some Chinese website URLs contain lots of numbers or are completely numbers like www.163.com. I understand some numbers have phoenetic value like '8' for 吧 but the others lead me kind of clueless. Any ideas?

[gato]

One reason may be that the alternative choice of using pinyin is too easy for people to get wrong. If you have the experience of trying to tell people in China the spelling of certain words, you'd know that even people who know English well can't pronounce/hear the letters accurately. They have trouble distinguishing r and l, n and m, and so forth. I think this is the case whether you use the English pronunciation or "Chinese pinyin" pronunciation. I often try to repeat several times and have them repeat back to me whenever I try to spell something like an email address, and even after that, I am still not quite sure that they got it. So why aren't there more names like baidu.com, hexun.com? Not sure. Maybe a lot of people have trouble with getting the pinyin right: like with the -ng endings, is it zhaoping.com or zhaopin.com, etc.?.

[Ding Yiyi]

I'm gonna bet its because outside their extreme youth, most Chinese people don't use pinyin, and therefore don't use Western characters. Sometims they do, but until they figure out a way to use characters in the URL bar they're going to be haphazard with whichever URL they choose.

[roddy]

Isn't there also research showing that for some reason Chinese speakers have a better memory for numbers? Or am I making that up?

[in_lab]

They could have used a Chinese domain name, right? Maybe the owners think that numbers are better than English, pinyin, or Chinese, or maybe the Chinese domain names just aren't catching on for some reason.

[zhwj]

The problem with Chinese domain names is that they weren't supported until recently, and there are still problems with browers and routers.

One of the solutions was the company 3721 (another number-name) that sold postions on a Chinese-word index/toolbar that would connect browsers to the real URLs.

Something that's fun to do for a few minutes is to type random numbers into the address bar and see what weird Chinese site pops up....(you're going to want to prefix the domain with www since lots of Chinese sites don't seem to support naked domain names)

[Zhende ma?]

Yeah, I suspected those were some of the reasons but I always wondered if there was special meaning behind the numbers, I mean not many seem to be homonyms to anything. I was wondering maybe dates or old numerology had an impact

[Jockster]

They could have used a Chinese domain name, right?

Isn't website address and domain name two different things? Anyways, I think that it was going to become possible to use Chinese characters in website addresses. But what happens if you are, for example, surfing in an Internet café and the computer does not have a Chinese IME installed?

I suppose the easiest way would be to allow Chinese users to use Chinese characters in website addresses, and the browser would then translate it into pinyin before actually accessing the site. That way the rest of the world could access Chinese sites, too. Is this how it is going to be done, does anyone know?

I know, I know, many Chinese characters have a number of pronunciations, it is not quite this simple...

[in_lab]

Domain name and address are not quite the same thing. Here's a definition for domain name:

A name that identifies one or more IP addresses. For example, the domain name microsoft.com represents about a dozen IP addresses. Domain names are used in URLs to identify particular Web pages. For example, in the URL http://www.pcwebopedia.com/index.html, the domain name is pcwebopedia.com.