And there was me thinking Gaydar had the stranglehold on Cruising sites. How wrong I am!

(Coat tag, I'm stocking them up!)

..."new site for online social networking, used to create a cruise community with user-generated content to meet the demands of this expanding sector".

Oh no...

<facepalm>

Not ANOTHER Crap 2.0 social-networking wannabe! I thought this garbage was supposed to be on its way out? Looks like they wasted half a million quid to set another Orkutfacemyspace lookalike that'll go nowhere fast; cruises indeed. Glad I'm not a shareholder with that company!

Mine's the one with the Hawaiian floral print and the sunnies and camera hanging off it.

"a "new site for online social networking, used to create a cruise community with user-generated content to meet the demands of this expanding sector"."

HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA.

Biggest waste of half a million ever.

If I was a shareholder of cruise.co.uk I would be upset about this! But I guess the German company must feel christmas has come early. For far less than £560k surely they could have bribed someone in Nominet to revoke the german co's ownership of a UK internet name, you know, like all the big co's in the US do with .coms??

You sell something. You expand a bit to sell more than one of 'em and it costs you 560k.......

Is it just me or does anyone else think they would have been better spending some of the money redesigning their current site?

I'm off to buy theregisters.co.uk. Yours for a cool million.

It took several re-reads before I found the first N is Seamus's surname.

After all, they wouldn't want anyone to associate them with that scientologist nut-job of an actor, would they?

So... a German company holding a .co.uk domain isn't cybersquatting?

I felt sorry for cruise.co.uk until it revealed they were just another bunch of web2.0 wannabes and nothing to do with actual cruises.

I'm sure everyones favourite Scientologist will be along shortly to sue the knickers off of the owners of both domains. It's the American way.

They might already have spent £££'s on research to show that people are more likely to search for 'cruises' rather than 'cruise' in google, so if they just added an 's' then this would result in bumping up their position on the top 5 list on the google search results page.

Our UK government regularly spends billions on research and consultation which is very very poor quality and/or biased, so it is not unreasonable to assume that if this company is willing to have spent 0.5 million pounds on an extra 's' then they might have done some research to make a good business case for it.

The other thing is that if people google for 'cruise', then what will the results actually be? Would they then type 'cruises' to get better results?

Where's the proof they stumped up the cash? Maybe some deal was struck whereby the purchase price was inflated to get some cheap publicity.

...when the domain crappyweb20.cruise.co.uk was freely available to them.

@MichaelG: if it was all done for google rankings, they could easily have got themselves listed under the search term "cruises" regardless of their domain, and for a lot less cash.

They'd at least pay a decent designer

the internet is still in its teenagehood!

Google, Yahoo and other search engines are just a phase in the

lifetime of the internet.

they were (still are for a lot of us!) great in the begining, since they provided an easy way to find websites/information. The winners obviously are those that appear in the first page rank!

but now, try googling for cruise, and see how many results you get.

(I got 'Results 1 - 10 of about 213,000,000 for cruise ')

how would you know that the one you were looking for is

not the 90,397,376th website?

Direct traffic (i.e typing what you are looking for directly in the address bar)

is the next phase.It is growing fast! And this is why a lot of companies are

paying fortunes for premium domains.

of course, to be able to afford these prime spots, a company must be good at what it does!

(+ paying such a price, attracts media attention, and publicity)

great move by cruise.co.uk !