Start unique and drop the “the” – some thoughts on URLs (opens in new tab)

This is a result of the inferior auto-complete implementation in Chrome. Firefox does not have this issue.

I'd note that it seems to be Chrome-specific problem. Firefox, for example, searches for any substring matches, not only prefixes (although they seem to reasonably prefer results that are matching on word boundaries).

They should've picked guardian.io and used 4em Droid Sans everywhere with lots of coffee mug stock photos.

Handy tip: the Guardian own gu.com - so you can type gu.com to go straight to theguardian.com (they also use it for their URL shortener)

I'm sure the domain without the "the" was taken, so this isn't particularly useful advice for someone moving to the crowded .com TLD.

That's fair, but is it really so much work to enter three extra keys on a url? That doesn't strike me as a convincing enough reason not to attempt a brand change, if it otherwise makes sense. (Unless there are many frustrated mobile users somewhere who've decided they've put up with long urls far enough!)

Using an article such as "the" in a brand typically indicates a desire to lay stake on a common noun as a proper noun, or at least the definitive instance of the noun. It often doesn't make sense when your brand is obviously a proper noun or otherwise unique already, but I suppose there's plenty enough newspapers having a variant of "Guardian" in their titles to warrant a push to definitive-hood.

Edit: A friend also pointed out that "guardian.com" is already taken by another established organization. I think that trumps my silly grammatical analysis :P

Are there really people who will decide "I want to read the Guardian now," and then when they find they have to type four or five letters into their browser bar instead of just one, will decide not to bother? It's now too much effort to type four or five keys? (It's possible, I suppose; I am way out of touch and I still don't understand much of what the kids do now - that thing where "Dave is the mayor of some street corner" was a total mystery to me)

Having 'the' at the start is not ideal, but Guardian Glass (who own guardian.com) no doubt wanted a lot of money for it.

In any case, all the cool kids use gu.com

From a branding perspective, if you're forced to use an underscore for a twitter or instagram name, always put it at the end.

Sad to see the Guardian go to a .com

This was part of my thinking in http://getstarter.com single key navigation to your favorite web sites, but for some reason it seems not to catch on that well.

"I don’t think I visit another site beginning with x"

Yeah yeah..!