.com, .net, etc. ??? why purchase all??

[sarb]

I am wondering what the advantages, disadvantages of purchasing both the .com and .net etc. of a domain name are.

Does having both help you with search engines in anyway? Does it really matter if you have purchased the .com form and someone else purchases the .net form? If you have the .com, isn't that the most important one and would there really be much confusion associated with two different companies sharing the same name, but one is .com and one is .net? I'm trying to decide if it's worth purchasing all the similar domains or not and why?

Anyone have any strong feelings on this subject???

Thanks
sarb

[gizmo]

I would purchase both simply because if you only had mysite.com the owner of mysite.net may have some rather unsavoury content that you may not wish to be associated with. It is a small price to pay.

[felgall]

You can't buy all the similar names siince there are about a thousand different variations and many are restricted as to who can uy them. You can buy many of the more common ones and should do so if you are worried about someone trying to piggyback off your site by setting up on one of the similar ones.

You probably need to look at getting the .com .net and the country specific equivalents for your country as the four most important ones (although as most US residents seem to prefer searching for international instead of US based sites the .us equiivalents are probably less important than the country specific versions are if you are in another country).