A few days ago (Thursday, June 26th), Iccan announced they approved a recommendation put forth by it's stake holders that would allow businesses to purchase or even resell new, custom top level domain names.

What is a top level domain name (tld)?

A top level domain name is the portion of a domain name that appears after the ".", so for example: if you had "business.com" as your domain then the "com" would be your top level domain name. Icaan is now making it so that new top level domains can exist on the internet like .coke or .water, etc. The new tld's are expected to be available for purchase sometime in 2009.

Will .com's become less valuable?

It now seems businesses have many new ways to market their ideas over the internet with an expanded top level space. If you take into consideration that there are already many other alternatives to the .com top level domain, we already know and can conclude that the demand for ".com" domains hasn't gone down as some of the largest domain resellers, places like godaddy and register.com, still recommend ".com" as a first choice before doing a domain name availability check. As famous domainer Frank Schilling put it:

adding more skim milk to the mix will not stop the cream from rising, and that cream is .com

What does this mean for Search Marketing?

• More websites and business ideas will be going up
• More people utilizing and depending upon search to find what they need in the expanding fray of websites
• Potentially less domain traffic to the .com's

From all this, you could predict that search will continue to rise and will be needed even more as the domain market becomes further saturated with new businesses ventures. Search engines bring the signal out of the noise that is on the internet which is something I don't see fading anytime soon.