Last Friday news broke that Insure.com sold its domain name and all related media assets for $16M. They’re changing their name to Life Quotes (click here to see the original story).

Is buying a domain name for $16M dollars a good idea?

In the classic book The 22 Immutable Laws of Branding, Al and Laura Reis maintain that generic brand names are worse than, well, proper brand names. According to the Reises, it’s easier to remember Amazon.com than Books.com.

More important than memorable URLs though, is Google Juice. How high does Insure.com rank in Google?

Sure enough, search for “insure” on Google.com and Insure.com is the first result. But what do people search for when they’re looking for insurance? Below is a screenshot form Google trends which shows a comparison between how often people search for “insure” on one hand and “insurance” on the other. (See for yourself here.)

Search trends for the term insurance vs. insure

Why are we only seeing one line? Because compared to “insurance”, the search term “insure” doesn’t even register. And where does Insure.com rank when you search for the wildly more popular “insurance”? It ranks at no. 37. Insurance.com is at no. 10.

It makes you wonder whether they accidentally bought the wrong domain name.