How widespread are use of IDN's currently in Germany?
When registering a non-IDN of a name comprising of ö or ü, do people just treat it as a regular o and u? Is the combination of letters, for example oe, to create those characters on a regular keyboard, considered a typo?
IDNs are most commonly used in many European countries.
In german, the letters ä, ö, ü, and ß are called Umlauts. These Umlauts are widely used in German, Austria and some part of Switzerland where Germanic keyboard is in use.
When the use of an umlaut is not permitted, either because all the letters are capitalised, or because the writer does not have access to a font incorporating umlauts, the letter "e" is used immediately after the umlauted letter. An example would be München: when the umlaut is unavailable it is spelled Muenchen.
So using your übersetzer.de example above, prior to IDNs, would the proper domain have been uebersetzer.de? That and ubersetzer.de are both registered - would the second one be considered a typing error?
Yes, prior to the arrival of IDN names, people have used uebersetzer.de, and still they are using uebersetzer.de when they have no Germanic keyboards.
Using the Umlaut letter + the letter "e" is not considered as an error. It is considered as the proper replacement for the Umlaut character.
The umlaut ß, can be written as double-s (ss) when Germanic keyboard is not available. Except this letter ß, all other umlauts are written as Umlaut letter + "e" when Germanic keyboard is not available.
Börse can be written as Boerse, when no Germanic keyboard is available.
Remember, in domaining Börse.de is a different name, and Boerse.de is a different name.
The ASCII form of Börse.de actually represents xn--brse-5qa.de, whereas the form boerse is already in ASCII form.
Börse.de and Boerse.de are owned by the same company.
Not exactly sure, but I remember trying to reg some german idns with the ß character, and it wasn't allowed. That's only if my memory serves me correctly. The other german accents are allowed. Not sure how long german .de IDNs have been available, but german IDNs.com have been available since 2000 or so, as well as most other languages that can be written in punycode.
ß renders as "ss" therefore you can't reg an idn with ß. the best I remember. another forum has discussed this a couple of times.
a quick search may prove useful.
If possible, it is a good idea to buy the umlaut and non-umlaut versions. That way you can offer your buyer a package. In a recent purchase of a .com I checked the stats, and found
google quotes:
ü => 4,640,000
ue => 60,500
The adwords data was even more impressive. There was *no* adword competition for the ue variant, while the ü variant had heavy adword competition.
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