You see people regularly whining about this kind of thing on technology blogs. "I went to a domain seller to search for mynameistrevor.com to find out if it was available," someone called Trevor might say, "and the next day, when I went to register it, someone had already nabbed it. I'm furious. I'm livid. Something fishy is going on." The suspicion is that, by typing mynameistrevor.com into a box and pressing "search", that it's alerting someone, somewhere, of Trevor's interest in the name, and this has prompted the scurrilous bounders to whip it away from under Trevor's nose. It's known as "front running".
Enough people have complained about suspiciously-timed registrations of this kind that ICANN, the non-profit corporation that oversees such matters, has today produced an official report into the matter. Essentially, the report says "we have absolutely no evidence that this is actually occurring, but if you have proof, please let us know." It's something of a victory for those who believe that it deserves to be taken seriously – but is proof ever likely to surface?
14.5m domains were registered in the second quarter of this year alone. An enormous number of those are bought in order to "park" them – i.e. contain one page that merely holds links and advertising: for instance, registering a domain that's a misspelling away from a popular site – such as, say, appple.com – is incredibly common. Frequently such sites are tested for the 5-day grace period under which a full refund can be claimed, and if they aren't shown to be profitable, they're let go.
This kind of full-scale speculative domain buying, with hundreds of thousands of names registered every day, is far more likely to account for Trevor's disappearing domain name than anything underhand. While it's certainly possible technically for your search query to be logged and acted upon, either by the site you're searching on or via spyware on your computer, industry figures are sceptical, including Dickie Armour, the general manager of Fibranet Services which runs the popular Free Parking domain registration service.
"Can you imagine how many queries are typed in at FreeParking or 123-Reg every day?" he mused. "Of all those thousands of queries, someone would have to be scanning them, then think yes, that one's good, and then going to the trouble of registering it. But what use could that name be to them? There's no way of finding the person who searched for that name, so it's not as if you can sell it back to them. It would represent an enormous amount of messing about for minimal reward."
The moral is – whether you side with those who believe it's a conspiracy, or those who believe it's a coincidence – if you find that your domain is available, don't hang around. Just buy it.
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Of course this is going on. Just ask Jeanette Winterson or others who have had to really battle to get their own domains back. Or talk to people who have registered all but one of the net, org, etc, to find they've missed one and that some bloody great company has swooped in and essentially edged them out. Happens every day my friend.
Posted by: Greenman | Thursday, 25 October 2007 at 09:29 PM
Yes, obviously deliberately nicking a domain name that someone else claims is rightfully theirs happens frequently - I wrote about an example in last week's blogs. That's one issue.
This is an entirely seperate one, of people's searches for domain names being intercepted.
Posted by: Rhodri Marsden | Thursday, 25 October 2007 at 10:49 PM
Well of course no one is looking through these domains manually. I've personally built a system that can scan 50'000 domains/day, rating them according to my own criteria and API results. These can then be automatically registered when they achieve a chosen ranking. With a client/server infrastructure that capacity could be increased 10-fold. I'm sure we're not the only ones.
The problem you get is with source data. That is where a supply of lookup data would be invaluable. You could also tweak the system to see when a new phrase became popular, letting you register all the common variations. This is the stuff computers were made for.
Lastly, you don't need to approach people to resell the domain they wanted. That's not how it works, they come to you. Usually through the WHOIS data or the parking page.
Posted by: Nick Wilsdon | Wednesday, 07 November 2007 at 11:04 AM