[mattlong]

Good question! We've been discussing this a bunch internally and will probably change in the near future. Doing so would provide a lot more trust that this service is indeed an official YC project. And I've I've recently learned, will do wonders for our SEO.

FWIW, the reasoning for not doing that from the start is that we wanted the site to be very closely associated with the act of searching for "I want to work at a startup". Perhaps that's a bit old school, but I still like to think there's a little bit of value in it...either way, we'll likely just redirect workatastartup.com to something on the ycombinator.com domain.

[shafyy]

Cool, thanks for the explanation. My opinion is that from a branding perspective, a subdomain of ycombinator.com would be much better. Otherwise, it seems like a cheap affiliate website (like those search engine optimized domain names). Ironically, in your case, using a subdomain will be better for SEO (as you correctly stated).