I contacted godaddy about it who denied it completely but I tested this again later on and found that when I used common words in any part of the domain, it would suddenly be ‘registered’ or for sale.

In other words, it looks like they have automated tools as well as people going over search lists to pick any names that are in fact pretty good ones.

I have since found that this never happens if I first of all, use CLI based whois searches on a linux box and second, search for names only if I am buying it as soon as I find one I like.

I really hope that we, the public, find a way to stop this nonsense because not only does it cost people when it should not but it is incredibly frustrating to have to spend hours, days and sometimes even weeks trying to find the right name for a certain project.

We all need to help each other and let people know how to stop this nonsense. I believe that we have an option such as http://reports.internic.net/cgi/registrars/problem-report.cgi and if this isn’t the right place, perhaps you might find a better one and post it at the very top of your blog.

Thanks.

For the past few years, but especially now, I am finding it more and more difficult to register a good name. It appears that almost every combination of words I can possibly dream up are always gone.

I started wondering if there are people or software monitoring my searches and instantly taking the better names I come up with, especially ones which use common words in any combination.

On the better ones lost which I could not believe someone else had registered, I decided to see what the other registrant was doing with the domain only to find it parked with ads. What really got my attention was that after a while of doing this, I started noticing that the ads seem to be instantly generated, there is a similarity to each site.

I notice that godaddy offers a $69.00 (or so) service to ‘help’ people find and register domains which are not available. Judging from the amount of extra offiers godaddy tries to suck you into when you register anything, it immediately made me wonder if my own registration hosting company is messing with me.

I now believe this is the case. I wrote to them asking if there might be anyone doing this type of thing and of course received a quick, long winded reply telling me that there was no such thing going on.

Last night, I lost out to yet another domain so decided to search it on the Internet and ended up finding the weirdest things I’ve ever seen. Searching for the exact domain lead me to countless dead links connected to almost every other domain we have ever registered with godaddy. In other words, say one of my domains was ABC.com, when I searched for thedomainIlost.com, I found countless google links to my other already registered domains. The other strange thing I found was my original search along with hundreds of others registered for that same day.

This means to me that someone, somewhere is watching what is being registered, perhaps even in real time? Is there software in place making sure that my searching for good names leads to additional costs?

Anyways, I do believe there is something going on. It is too weird that almost every common word combination is already taken.

Sorry for my rambling, I’m not the best writer :).

I’ll assume the search uses NetSol too. I haven’t been able to find out it this has been brought up as an issue in the software.

Is there a way to change how it does whois?

I queried a reasonably unique domain name that I thought had good keywords, using a well known online registrar, and within a week of me doing this it had been registered to someone else.

Could be coincidence… but who really knows?

So I’m surprised (and not surprised at the same time unfortunately) to hear it actually does happen.

Generally if I know there is a domain I want to use in the future and it’s available I’ll just order it straight away.