google and ebay are made up words that had little to do with their respective category until they became the dominant player.  Much like xerox or coke, their name eventually became synonymous with their product.

cars.com and weather.com are generic names that have taken on a brand of their own, but are very descriptive of the category in which they do business.

Plenty of sites do some work in between.  My ad agency name was created by removing the “ad” from advertising it and replacing it with ROI, (ROIvertising.com).  Since I made it up, it cost me $10/year.  This domain is a cute way to say escalate phonetically.  These take the approach of building a brand, even for small businesses.  After the initial purchase, all of the attributes will come from my investments into building a brand.

Others take the approach of using very descriptive phrases.  These are domains that you see and instantly have a guess to what they will deliver.  A couple of random selections:  I’m pretty sure that I’ll get apple rumors at macrumors.com and can buy lingerie through simplelingerie.com.  They are pretty good to be descriptive, and most of the work is done up front.  They also have some advantage through search engine optimization.

Even though my personal preference lies in building a brand, for many businesses paying the premium for a direct, descriptive domain can be worth it.  Natural Search traffic is “free” traffic after the inital expenditure.  Its possible to model the value of a descriptive domain by looking at the cost per click for the type of search and estimating the traffic.  Do the math and figure out your best path.  The answer won’t be the same for everyone.

Part of the answer is to think like small business or startup.  Use resources that are cheap or free that can still tell you about what people think of your produce.

Go to google or yahoo.  Search for your brand and the word “sucks.”  Compare that to your competitors.  “McDonalds Sucks” gives 1.77M pages, while “Burger king sucks“  delivers about 700K.  Your detractors may not be eloquent, but its likely thay have something interesting to say and have taken the time to do so in a very public forum.  If you find one or two insights out of a search engine tour, you’ve just saved the $50K you might have spent on a formal market research report to tell you the same thing.

I will say it takes a bit of a strong stomach to endure the vitriol of so many angry customers, but in the end it will make you and your brand better in the long run.