Recently, I had a neat idea for a website. I thought about what domain I could use. Being naive, I decided to do some searches on GoDaddy for some potential candidates. On June 6th, I am warming up to inmybelly.com, which was available. Two weeks pass, and I am ready to make the buy when I find out that it has been registered! Similar events have been reported by others before.
Coincidence? Perhaps. So I am going to do an experiment. I am going to search for domain names that could have some value to a squatter and see if they are taken. The domains I ran searches on GoDaddy for are for the time being, confidential to ensure readers don’t mess with my results. 🙂 I will run them through the search a second time in a week. Then, I will update this blog one additional week later with my results.
For the time being, I want to suggest to readers to always use the “whois” command from your Linux command line. 🙂
Yes, any news with this? I’ve just encountered this myself, too coincidental if you ask me. Within days my domain which had been previously unregistered, was taken.
I’m curious if you’ve gone back to look into this.
You’ve probably seen this already, but Slashdot had an article today about an investigation into this type of thing being run by ICANN:
http://slashdot.org/articles/07/10/25/1433207.shtml