Related link: http://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc2606.txt
Yesterday I was complaining to a friend about the difficulty in making up domain names to use as examples in documentation, since anything reasonable you can think of is guaranteed to exist, probably held by some random low-rent commercial outfit. This prompted him to type the ubiquitous example.com address into his Web browser for gaiety’s sake, and thus, to our surprise, did we discover RFC 2606. Drafted in 1999, it forbids anyone except our friends at IANA from owning the example.com domain, making it safe for use in documentation. (The same goes for example.org and example.net.)
But what if you’d like to use two or three completely different domains in your examples? Well, the RFC also declares that domain registries can’t even come near the .example TLD. I find this theoretically useful, but I’m not convinced that “anything.example” is as instantly recognizable as a domain as “anything.com” is. Perhaps it could be made to work through some crafty context-application.
Wow.
http://www.google.com/search?q=link%3Awww.example.com , 610 hits.
I use example.com
In my talks or articles, I typically use example.com as a standin domain. In the talks I get to explain the little peice of trivia you discovered, and tellthe audience that it might win them thousands of dollars if they ever get on Jeopardy! It is an excellent way to slow down a lecture to let people catch up.