Its is standardized. But some developers choose to do their own thing. Metal Gear Online made a terrible choice with 3 different accounts to play the game. Another one is Mercenaries 2 with non-standard multiplayer ports*. I have not come across anyone else. I think it is a good thing to give the publisher a choice in the matter. But some of them will obviously make stupid choices.
*) You can also blame NAT for this being an issue.
I agree with you. 99 times out of 100 when you enter a company's name, you get several hundred hits for web sites selling the company's product, but you won't find the link to the company you are looking for itself.
Care to come up with some examples? I just tried four company names and every one had the company as the first result. It might not be scientific but very far from 1 times out of 100 then? At this point you need 396 search queries that gives no match for the companys website within the first hundret results.
Google is fine when searching for companies it seems. Asus even had a link to their norwegian site as the first result (I sit in Norway).
"Everything should be made as simple as possible, but not simpler." -- Albert Einstein